“Browser history stored and made available to authorities.”
“Phone records collected en mass through NSA”
“Facial recognition being rolled out in the UK.”
As the frog is slowly boiled, The Rebel Bear tells us he is raising awareness with his new piece in Edinburgh, Scotland.
“It’s a comment on the current mass surveillance we are under.”
How do you measure the success of a street piece? Foot traffic? How long it runs before being dissed?
The Internet revolutionized our lives and our definition of community and along with that we extend the experience of art on the street to the conversations and sharing that takes place in the digital “social” realm. BSA lives in both spheres daily, capturing stuff on the street and then telling its story to a global audience online. The truth is, we never really know what people will like.
Actually we do know some things will always be a hit as time moves forward – pop culture references. Banksy and Shepard and D*Face and their generation could always count on Sid Vicious, Marilyn, Mickey, Her Majesty QE2 and the ironic turn of pop parlance to drive a humorous, campy, sarcastic point home. Today we can count on 90s rapper Biggie Smalls and Star Wars Storm Troopers in any iteration to send the image volleying through our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter referrals, comments, feeds. In fact, both Biggie and the Trooper made it into the top 15 mural collection this year and last year – made by different artists.
In fact, these 15 images are not all murals but they resonate with larger numbers than others we published this year; a visual conversation that includes legal, illegal, small, anonymous, massive, deliberately confounding, tossed off scrawling, handmade and mass produced stickers, tags, poetry, diatribes, culture jamming, ad takeovers, sculpture, installations. Every week we aim to present a varied selection of expressions currently represented on the street, and then it is your turn to respond.
During 2017 BSA readers responded to images via our website, Instagram, Twitter, Tumbr, and Facebook pages. In a thoroughly unscientific survey that calculates “likes” and “clicks” and “re-Tweets” and “impressions”, we tallied up which murals (or images) got the most interest from you. Care to interpret the results?
15 – Lonac.
Here is his multi-story mural of an artist friend painting a wall for “No Limit” Borås. Borås, Sweden. September, 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
14 – Add Fuel.
His mural of traditional Scottish tile patterning in Nuart Aberdeen captivated many readers. Aberdeen, Scotland. April, 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
13 – Daniel Buchsbaum.
Converting this water heater in a room of the Antique Toy Museum. Mexico City. November, 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
12 – Axe Colours.
For the second year in a row, but in different cities by different artists, the 1990s Brooklyn rapper Biggie Smalls appears on the top 15 list. This time he is in Barcelona, Spain. November, 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
11 – Miss Van.
Ever more surreal, this is an instant classic by Miss Van is in Barcelona, Spain. November, 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
10- Dave The Chimp.
The simplicity of Dave The Chimps’ characters can be a bit deceiving, considering how he manages to put them everywhere in so many situations. This one taps into our societal fears and the realization that our public (and private) moves are being recorded and scrutinized all the time, ready or not. Berlin, Germany. February, 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
9 – ATM Street Art.
Dude, the bird-admiring contingent online took this one and flew with it. It’s a Red-faced Warbler for Audubon Birds of Broadway. Manhattan, NYC. January, 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
8 – Suits.
A prize-winning use of existing conditions in furtherance of his message, Suits used this damaged wall very effectively. It helped to have Manhattan as a backdrop. Brooklyn, NYC. June, 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)
7 – BK Foxx.
Directly borrowed from a scene with Robert Dinero in the movie Taxi Driver, Street Artist BK Foxx uses the background to reference the never-ending scenes of violence that are in the news in the US. Brooklyn, NYC. November, 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
6 – Tatiana Fazlalizadeh.
This garden of the mind grows in Manhattan at public school PS92. Manhattan, NYC. January, 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
5 – The Outings Project.
Created during Nuart Aberdeen by Julien de Casabianca of the Outings Project, this reproduction of a painting was perfectly placed in a part of the city once known for the selling of people as slaves. An uncomfortable bit of beauty maximizes the possibilities with perfect placement. Aberdeen, Scotland. April, 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
4 – 1UP Crew…and other vandals.
An iconic and isolated Brooklyn rooftop scene in the winter is made forbidding and welcoming by the snow storm and picnic tables. Brooklyn, NYC. February, 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
3 – Pyramid Oracle.
Ascending the subway stairs to see the grand wizened man with a third eye, this black and white image was somehow inspirational to many of our fans. Manhattan, NYC. April 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
2 – Raf Urban.
A mid-sized wheat-pasted stencil piece claims the number 2 spot with the former President and First Lady, along with the message “Diversity is Hope.” Brooklyn, NYC. April, 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
1 – Jerkface.
Guy Fawkes is a folk hero for the Occupy generation, here surrounded by the encroaching anonymous armature of the police state, represented by Storm Troopers. You can read many messages into this and like most good art, you’d would be right. Manhattan, NYC. March, 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
“Resistance is here to stay, welcome to your 100th day” – said people in Climate Marches across the country yesterday to President Exxon-Lockheed. God, has it only been 100 days? It feels like 1,000. Nevertheless, there are a lot of new politically themed pieces popping up on the street regularly, along with completely apolitical and humorous ones. Either way, we always dig the conversation on the street.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring: Adam Fujita, Brolga, Carlos Colp, Jaune, Legend, Lost Hills, Lunge Box, Myth, Raf Urban, Taco, and Tatyana Fazlalizadeh.
Boom! There it is! This is springtime and there is a lot of new stuff popping up like tulips and out like cherry blossoms. If you didn’t get to the Martha Cooper opening at Steven Kasher gallery this week it is open during the week- a great cross section of her work during the last four decades or so. Additionally the Richard Hambleton film “Shadowman” debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival Friday night and is making a lot of waves and you can see works of his at Woodward Gallery right now.
Also this week a group of New York Street Artists officially are suing McDonalds for using their street work in long-form commercials without permission – a story we first brought to fore and we subsequently discussed – including giving one of the artists who was deeply affected a platform to speak. It remains to be seen who is directly responsible for this infringement but that doesn’t stop the fabulous loose talk and salacious assertions. Some people are lovin’ it.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring: Add Fuel, C3, Cash4, D7606, Cope, Don Rimx, Hardened Lock, Hervé, Immaker, Isaac Cordal, Jaune, Julien De Casabianca, Lunge Box, Okuda, Order55, Phil, and Queen Andrea.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. ADD FUEL – Nuart Aberdeen 2017
2. Alice Pasquini – Nuart Aberdeen 2017
3. Isaac Cordal – Nuart Aberdeen 2017
4. M-City in Aberdeen for Nuart 2017 via BrooklynStreetArt.com
Doug Gillen from Fifth Wall TV shadowed artists at work in Aberdeen, Scotland last week and began a series of videos that give you an idea about their art and their individual approach to it. Today we have the first three freshly released from Nuart Aberdeen for your enjoyment.
So, how do you get the party started in Aberdeen? You Add Fuel! The artists’ practice of tile making back home in Portugal is translated here by his study of local Scottish decorative motifs and tradition – with one layer tearing back to reveal another beneath it.
Roman Street Artist Alice Pasquini has a color palette rather custom made for nautical scenes and seaside cities- and somehow brings a Mediterranean air of romance to this stormy Scottish city on the North Sea. Her figures and portraits seem to appear by surprise on small sections of doorways or corners of disused billboards – and this larger mural sized piece is rightly juxtaposed on Ship Row almost across from the Aberdeen Maritime Museum.Video by Doug Gillen/Fifth Wall TV.
The Spanish Street Artist continued his indirect critique of corporate capitalists by installing his little grey-suited businessmen throughout the oil city that has been shaken by markets. For some reason, the scale makes the figures comic, and the context of the great wide world helps put these soldiers of white-collar shenanigans into a position of low impact. But we’re just kidding ourselves if we think they are inconsequential – they are the enablers of the machine. These are the human levers of the oligarchy who Isaac Cordal is perching on ledges, balancing on wires, placing on terraces staring intently at spreadsheets and stock numbers on their phones. Now his miniature worried men are perched all over Aberdeen. Can you spot them? Video by Doug Gillen/Fifth Wall TV
Who would like to experience the slow ascent into the air on a cherry picker with M-City as you survey his new completed mural for Nuart Aberdeen? This short home made video by Jaime Rojo gives you a look at a street level perspective while travel mills around the freshly painted piece.
Many thanks to Doug/Fifth Wall for sharing his video work here with BSA readers. For for information about Fifth Wall please go HERE.
https://www.instagram.com/fifthwalltv/
End of Passover for many, the best day of Easter weekend for others, just another spring day for still others, and a fine finish to our little Aberdeen excursion. As we ready ourselves to charge forward on small streets in this city that has a severe case of Multiple Weather Disorder, we’re bringing scarves, gloves, umbrellas, a zip-lock bag with salt, sun block, swim suits, a snow shovel and a road flare in the backpack, for emergencies. Also a small flask of Highland Park 18 single malt skotch whisky for medical purposes.
The panel discussions with Evan Pricco and Pedro Soares and artists and Brandalism representatives were intellectually stimulating and sometimes deliciously gossipy. According to one audience member who attended Saturday’s talks, a favorite feature was when one participant was when a German guy in the audience took an opportunity to launch a diatribe against simply pretty pleasant public art and to compare this pleasantry with Hitler and death camps. That sort of thing always advances the conversation, don’t you think? But the point is well taken, even if it was delivered by hammer.
Interesting to see that smaller pieces are also popping up here and there in the areas that these large and small approved artworks have appeared. You can sense again that there is an excited contingent of visual artists here who are feeling like they need an outlet and an outlet. We spoke with some really enthusiastic art students at the Drummond club, yelling over the thumping electronic music, who had fashioned hats and costumes out of tin foil.
Alexander Campbell, a sprightly and activist artist and student here at Gray’s School of Art who has the intensity of three, explains that the tin hats are really “conspiracy hats”, and speaks about larger issues that his photographic collage work addresses about war profiteering, definitions of terrorism, objectification of people, power, the coercive power of sex. The usual.
It appears that joy and pain are intertwined always, histories overlap with today of the city always includes stories from locals about the white slave trade that flourished here in the area where Julian de Casabianca wheatpasted his two enormous children. Taken directly from images in the collection of the Aberdeen Museum he says, and a stunning installation that acknowledges the cultural history.
The overwhelming response of people on the tour to the pleasant and the unpleasant themes expressed or alluded to in a number of the works in Nuart Aberdeen says a lot about a culture’s willingness to look things frankly in the eye, as well as to just celebrate for the art of it. At the very least, people here say that they are experiencing something new in the public space with many other Aberdeenians, a true measure of the successful engagement of art in the streets.
Okay, gotta go do our last tour. See you all soon.
So here’s our Aberdeen interview with the streets with images from Alice Pasquini, Herakut, Isaac Cordal, Juane, Jet Pack Dinasaur, Julian De Casabianca, and Martin Whatson
“I have two questions,” said one smartly sweatered and coiffed lady of a certain age. She had grabbed an elbow as we waded through the 350-person tour that we were leading through Aberdeen streets with Jon Reid. “Who gave you all permission to paint your pictures on these walls?” she asked. “And number two: When and where did this whole movement begin?”
Those seemed like relatively easy to answer questions, and they would have been if a small blue car didn’t start honking it’s little insistent horn at us, seeing as we were standing in the middle of the road with Mrs. Siddens. As it turns out, Mrs. Siddens didn’t just have two questions. She had 162.
But that is to be expected here in Aberdeen right now as Nuart has more or less popped open the magic Street Art lamp and the lively spirits are swirling up Jopps Lane camera-in-hand behind parking lots and mechanic shops, and other streets that locals rarely explore.
So here’s an aspect of the scene that we don’t interact with too much – the completely gob-smacked art fan who can’t believe their luck to be regaled with new art and artists. The big cities that have a history with graffiti and, later, street art – or just the plastic arts in general, are often blasé when encountering a new addition to the street, so easily spoiled us humans are.
But here in Aberdeen – today it looked like there had been such a pent-up desire for any kind of public visual expression of art in the streets that it erupted inside the bottle and verily foamed and frothed out to these historied brick streets.– Like a top secret camera-armed terrorist cell suddenly activated; old, young, entire families… all fanned out across the streets to capture hundreds, thousands of images of M-City and Jaune and Nipper and Alice Mirachi and Martin Whatson and all of the crew.
Okay terrorist analogies are ham-handed, but its just like that!
Our BSA Film Friday LIVE event at the Belmont Filmhouse was a lot of fun, with engaged and aghast reactions to art interventions by artists like Kut Collective, Akay, and Vhils. Hawaiian born artist Hula’s portraits painted on ice rafts in the melting arctic cap amongst the Inuit people was the one that actually elicited gasps, with at least one woman crying.
Also Street Artist Fintan Magee left his wall early to come to the show and be our special guest presenter of his video about his mural made during his time with Syrian children who were confined to refugee camps in Amman, Jordan recently.
Also, have we mentioned the Fight Night? A Nuart tradition worth preserving, with artists and experts of all ilks convening as small teams on the stage to debate two sides of an issue. Friday night in the “Underground”, a basement pub with wood and soldiered steel stools and deliberately dark lighting, the assembled clump of fans Street Art and beer gathered around the stage to hear a debate that pitted large murals against small interventions.
Among the sparring, personal insults, laughter, and flashes of Juanes leg’s vexing and tantalizing the crowd beneath his new his new plaid kilt, somehow the female panelists on each team landed some of the strongest arguments. – Alice Pasquini for the small interventions and Jasmine from Herakut presented thoughtful reasoned rationale while the men bandied about jokes referring to size and an inexplicable reference to baby pandas by Evan Pricco turned into a running joke. Ultimately, the “small interventions” team prevailed by the thinnest of margins over large murals in during the final audience vote.
So the panel discussions, on-stage interviews with artists, kids programs, tours and movie screenings continue today, with us introducing the debut of “Saving Banksy” and Nuart’s James Finucane introducing the 2011 mini-doc about Nuart and it’s early beginnings.
In an exciting development, there are some surprise Street Art pieces going up in the areas that the new formal interventions are going, suggesting that a seeding of the soil is producing local fruit. It is spring after all. Time for a renewal. Slàinte mhath!
Aabody* at the club got tipsy* last night in the Anatomy Rooms, a former academic space for students at University of Aberdeen that still has random skeletons and 3-D plastic diagrams of humans cut in half.
Anatomy Rooms is now an artist-run space with studios for “makers” and creatives of various disciplines and the Nuart Aberdeen event brought a central focus to Street Artist Julien De CasaBianca in the main lecture hall; we watched attentively pacing back and forth in front of us where bodies were probably dissected for lectures.
To many people’s delight, he gave a riveting and humorous lecture to the packed hall of rowdy desk-pounding bookish attendees, recounting his path of accidental entry into the Street Art scene via reluctant museum visits and classical painters – which alone would have been entertaining enough.
However Professor Julian just happened to throw in additional colorful story-lines about Corsican mobsters, stenciled signs at concentration camps, jail time, accidental homicide, and an uncle’s planned suicide that was accompanied by an elaborate display of fireworks.
At the end of Julien’s barrage of 234 slides and the accompanying raucous applause, the rambunctious guests headed down the steps for the beer (2 pound donation), the loo, the Street Art Instagram projection show by Jon Reid, and the darkened DJ chill lounge which seemed to be playing slow jams from the 80s and 90s, encouraging art folk to gently sway their anatomies in close proximity to one another.
Also, murals.
De CasaBianca’s “Outings Project” completed his second enormous installation of a thoughtful boy in a previously industrial passage over slippery rounded brick streets.
With all that wheat-paste splashed acrossed the wall in buckets there was a huge puddle of the white gooey stuff just waiting for at least one intrepid camera-happy Street Art hunter to evaluate carefully.
M-City put the final aerosol touches on his two walls, which are set at a 90 degree angle with one another along a tightly winding street that snakes among old factories with smokestacks and a parking garage that serves a nearby shopping district.
The images of oil barrels falling through the sky onto two oil tankers below and into the ocean have a direct relationship to the petroleum-fueled economy of Aberdeen and we’ll need to get that full story from the Polish stencil machine and professor – We’ll get back to you on it.
Jasmine was high on the lift making final adjustments to the Herakut mural that on Aberdeen Market that now commands a triangle of pedestrian activity while Falk, the second half of the German Street Art/fine art duo, was off getting married. Slacker.
Juane continued to find secret small locations to install his miniature workmen stencils while Isaac Cordal prepared a wall for a larger multi-terrace show of his morose and guilty businessmen to contemplate their existences upon.
Nipper, the Norwegian (Bergen) of generous spirit, worked with local artists and volunteers to create his glassine envelopes stuffed with artworks – which are then snapped onto clip-boards and hung around the city center. These missives are meant as encapsulated communications, with some containing directives to carry out activities, while others are simply a collection of collage, drawings, crafts from local artists, poets. He calls them #missiondirectives .
This is Street Art as a most engaging act, a method of somewhat random communication that meets you at eye level and asks you to participate if you would like. While Cordal and a friend and Jaime played Jenga nervously at the breakfast table and the waitress brought a small iron skillet of eggs, tomato, sausage and bacon, (John) Nipper talked about one of the local artist contributor’s idea for the street missive that she was making contents for.
John says that she wanted to encourage the concept and practice of taking a creative journey, so she was thinking of buying a bus ticket to a favorite Scottish destination and putting it in the pack to be hung anonymously on the street.
Fintan Magee has been working on the first of two walls that will together form one complete story, with the assistance of local artist and public art curator Mary (check out “Painted Doors” here in Aberdeen) and her legs and knee-high boots are actually featured standing upon a boulder in the brand new mural.
Fintan tells us that he still has a lot of work to do, but he will be to stop work today by 1800 hrs so he can get over to our BSA Film Friday LIVE show tonight – we’re actually showing one of his videos among the 12 we have selected for the Belmont Filmhouse – Aberdeen’s foremost independent cinema. As our special guest tonight, Fintan is going to regale the audience about the genesis of the film and what he was doing in Amman, Jordan at the time.
So we are about to run out on the street and see as much as possible right now – but if you are in Aberdeen we’re really looking forward to meeting YOU tonight at BSA Film Friday LIVE! (see more information below).
If you got tickets to “Saving Banksy” which we’re introducing tomorrow, lucky you! It’s sold out the for largest theatre of their three screens. Aberdeen represent, yo!
BSA Film Friday LIVE tonight at Belmont Filmhouse – more HERE.
*Aabody – Doric for everybody, or as J-Kwon says in that dope 2000’s jam “Tipsy” – “errrbody”.
This white and grey skurry appears rather plump as he waddles across the stone road in Aberdeen toward the cherry picker that holds Jasmine from Herakut aloft as she paints the new piece on the concave wall. Skurry is the Doric term for seagull, and Doric is a dialect of the North East of Scotland that thrives principally here in this seaside oil city of 230,000, so you’ll hear a few terms creeping into the sentences here and there.
There are plenty of skurries flying above and cawing and milling about these narrow streets. With their clean feathers and portly dispositions they are also looking a lot like a Sunday dinner, bellies round from a hearty diet of shellfish and other small sea creatures – and Doritos, according to a humorous story of theft you’ll hear here over a tall beer in a dark bar.
We’ve just arrived and it’s a cold and windy Passover/Easter week and nope, no bagpipes or kilts yet. Well, except for the one punk girl in a kilt-inspired skirt and black boots near Belmont Street walking past the former St Nicholas Congregational Church, now the home of booming nightclubs called Priory and Redemption over the last couple of years.
Elsewhere we found a kilt on one of Street Artist Jaune’s miniature stencil workmen, newly sprayed at the foot of a larger 13 year old stencil of a traditional ‘piper’ by Scottish Street Artist Elki, who now does a lot of studio stencil work in Glasgow. This fresh collaboration is a metaphor for what is happening here with Nuart Aberdeen this week, say a number of the local art scenesters, including artist Jon Reid, who is touring us around on foot with his friend Justine and Evan Pricco from Juxtapoz.
Jon peppers his tour with plenty of local history and pointed commentary as we head up Castle Street (well named), past the Salvation Army citadel, glancing at the old clock tower, the courthouse tower, the Tolbooth Museum in a 17th century former jail with steep spiral staircases and tales of crime and punishment.
He looks at the old Elki stencil of the bagpiper and says that its one of those Street Art pieces that somehow is taken care of, despite the rules of ephemerality one usually expects in the urban art game. “They’ve always preserved this one. There’ve been tags and stuff around it and you can see where its been whitewashed but they’ve always preserved it.”
For Jon, a tall young guy with a beard and strong voice who has been following and advocating the local art scene with his blog “Dancing in the Dark” for a number of years, seeing this new addition of Jaune’s signature workmen is a meaningful development, symbolic for the local artists scene and to street culture here. And Nuart is a part of it.
“Seeing it makes me quite proud, to see that Aberdeen has got this festival up and that people are embracing it – everybody can take something from it, the artists and yourselves and the local people,” he says as we walk a few more meters past the a large billboard that will be new Robert Montgomery piece for Nuart Aberdeen.
Only two words from the upcoming missive are visible so far, written in white block font on the upper left corner of the black rectangle.
“Modernism Modernism”
Perhaps this is a most apt description for a this new festival that is inserting fresh artistic voices among the winding streets and the historic buildings of Aberdeen. Sort of like these teens you watch doing hardcore BMX bike tricks despite the cold April winds blowing here across the fortified base of the yet another ornate Flemish-Gothic granite behemoth from hundreds of years ago. The tricks and energy of the new generation brings the site alive on the street, startling and relevant in these raucous moments of change and upheaval.
| FIRST ARTISTS ANNOUNCED | NUART TALKS PROGRAM | BSA FILM FRIDAY LIVE | LIVE ARTIST INTERVIEWS | KEYNOTE SPEAKERS | FIGHT NIGHT RETURNS |
| SPECIAL FILMS THROUGHOUT EASTER WEEKEND AT BELMONT THEATRE |
NUART in Stavanger Norway has been distinguishing itself as a top-notch series of events showcasing Street Art and graffiti culture with full respect to its antecedents while spotlighting some talents and movements from the current scene who have made the path by walking.
This April Nuart becomes mobile and shines from Aberdeen, Scotland with a line-up of International artists that will be announced this week to bring new voices to this pivotal port city where the Dee and Don rivers meet the North Sea.
BSA has closely followed Nuart for 9 years and presented, participated, documented, and interpreted the programming, street and gallery installations we’ve experienced for readers of Brooklyn Street Art and The Huffington Post and we’re happy to announce we’ll be in Aberdeen with you in April.
The artist roster is looking stellar including these first three veterans of Nuart during its previous incarnations, Robert Montgomery, Herakut and Julien de Casabianca. Included in the events are some of the erudite Nuart Talks with keynotes and artist interviews and a new edition of Fight Night, as well as BSA in person for BSA FILM FRIDAY LIVE at the Belmont Cinema where we’ll also introduce movies to Aberdeen Street Art fans throughout the Easter weekend.
We’re excited to see the reliably inventive, visonary and resourceful Nuart team, the installations of new works by some of your favorite Street Artists, and hopefully we’ll get to meet many BSA readers in Scotland this April! More on this on BSA Facebook and Twitter as details emerge.
For more info go to:
Website: http://www.nuartaberdeen.co.uk/
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/nuartaberdeen
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/nuartaberdeen
When you take a step back to observe some of the personal campaigns that Street Artists have launched over the last decade or so, it begins to come into focus that in many ways people are trying to reclaim the public sphere for the everyday person. It’s far more complicated than that, but using the same techniques and visual vernacular of for-profit concerns, you see ever-larger pieces of Street Art work that attempt to take back the visual landscape in favor of the local human, rather than the market-tested and safely idealized .01%.
Street Artists like JR are recently well known for making a big impression plastering black and white images of everyday people on buildings and rooftops, but he is actually one of many artists since the early 2000s. His black and white portraits have join a proud parade of many Street Artists like C215, Swoon, Fauxreel, Specter, Chris Stain, NohJColey, Jetsonorama, and Gaia and others who have been featuring portraits of real people from the hood for most of their street “careers”, bearing witness to the stories of regular people who are normally dwarfed by the billboards.
Today we bring you an art project/social campaign by illustrator Joe Caslin in Edinburgh, Scotland that has the more focused and deliberate aim of re-positioning the maligned image of a segment of youth in the city. Smacking of the same sort of comfy classicism that keeps certain youth marginalized in New York and elsewhere, recent trends in Edinburgh appear have begun to demonize an entire generation of youth, particularly boys, using collective guilt by association and insidiously damning methods of generalization about their appearance.
“This generational group is openly ridiculed and demonized,” explains Joe about the extent of the problem. “By using words such as NED (Non-Educated-Delinquent) and CHAV (Council-Housed-And-Violent) we continually push young people out of society and slowly beat them into apathy,” he says. With this Street Art campaign, the faces of the youth are brought back to the street to claim a right to it. Of the discrimination and misinformation that is creeping in an obviously dangerous direction, Caslin has a simple goal, “I want to change this.”
By enlisting the help of a group of “young lads” in the local area, Caslin’s portraits of them have been plastered all around, some as high as 40 feet tall, in this historic capital of half a million. With their efforts they hope that the size and poignancy of these wheat-pastes can compete with commercial messages and certain societal mischaracterizations.
“When you’re walking around town you see these great big billboards with pictures of celebrities or models for big brands and it will be good to see a giant image of a normal teenager in a hoodie,” says one of the young men who participated in the project entitled ‘Our Nation’s Sons’, “It’s good to have like a normal person on such a huge scale.”
Caslin, a recent Edinburgh art school graduate, has had some success getting support for the project from local police organizations and from the Edinburgh City Council. So that is good news. But the boys have a more realistic experience on the street. “People generally want to keep certain people out of the view,” says Andreas, one of the subjects of the huge portraits as he reflects on the extent of the problem that he hopes to impact.
Of the pervasive nature of discrimination, another participant named Kieran says, “People make assumptions the minute they see people – about what they’re wearing or how they talk. It seems that after a while you start feeling that way too.” With their ‘Our Nation’s Sons’ Street Art campaign, these guys may restart the conversation in a way that opens opportunities, instead of shutting them off.
See Our Nation’s Son’s Project here.
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They say you don’t know what you have till it’s gone, and Street Artist EMA is lately having a hankering for the People’s Republic of Brooklyn, even though she’s in Scotland now after a decade in BK. It was a period of great personal change, challenge, and inspiration for her development as a person and as an artist. That’s why her current show is called “Breuckelen”.
EMA (photo © EMA)From spraying graffiti in the street in the early 1990s to gallery shows and back and forth, EMA is one of the many artists who sees her expression as a part of a continuum. Now she’s showing ink drawings that blend influences from Art Deco, science, fiction, and graffiti for this solo show called “Breuckelen”, a reference to the Dutch name it had in the 1600s.
In preparation for her show opening Friday, EMA gives us a look at the action in her studio. Explains EMA, “This year marks the 10th anniversary of my move to New York. To celebrate that, I am doing a year round of artistic projects on that theme.”
For more information about “Breuckelen” click on the link below:
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