Saturdays and Elfo; they appear to go well together on BSA. A master of broad overstatement or obscurely uttered truths without further qualification, their work can summon the instinct to laugh – bursting from your chest before quite considering why.
Is it the unartful roller painting, the wandering scale of the message that could have said something moving, meaningful, sublime, profound? A missed opportunity or a spot-on and concise summation? Or are you projecting your own needs as an artist onto the work of someone else?
Here we have the crumbling architecture of a particular period drifting downward back into the earth where it was summoned from. En route to its final demise, Elfo gives it a swift kick in the ribs, perhaps mocking it for its earlier airs of greatness or condemning our casual disposal of buildings (and everything else). Dust to dust.
Of this “new piece in the midst of nowhere,” Elfo says, “It’ s…… ironic / auto ironic Iconic / anti iconic Dramatic / funny.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Mr. Kriss – In Our Hands
2. You Are The Subject: Richard Serra at Glenstone
3. Indecline: “Ironic, Isn’t It?”
BSA Special Feature: Mr. Kriss – In Our Hands
Kristián Mensa, better know by his stage name Mr. Kriss, is a Czech actor, dancer and illustrator based in London, UK.
“In Our Hands” is an upcoming animated short film by Mr. Kriss.
Camera and Edit – Jan Pivoňka Animation – Petr Šenkýř
You Are The Subject: Richard Serra at Glenstone
“In July of 2021, a 656,000-pound sculpture made of forged steel crossed state lines and bridges on its way to Glenstone. It traveled slowly, winding its way from New Jersey to Maryland. At dusk, it crossed the Susquehanna River. At midnight, it arrived.
You Are The Subject: Richard Serra at Glenstone, a new short film, tells the multi-year story of the installation and opening of Richard Serra’s Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure, 2017.
Produced with Rava Films, You Are The Subject is now available digitally in collaboration with designboom, following a world premiere at the Montreal International Festival of Films on Art on March 17, 2023.”
Indecline: “Ironic, Isn’t It?”
We recently published HERE the subversive and anonymous collective Indecline’s latest billboard takeover protesting mass shootings and the lack of adequate laws to regulate guns in America. With the most recent mass shooting in Louisville, there have been 146 mass shootings in the USA this year alone. According to existing data, the number makes more mass shootings than days in 2023 so far.
“This is an exhibition focusing on a very specific concept: design. I had to think about how we use the space in the Design Museum as a whole, and the exhibition offers a rich experience of what design is, and how design relates to our past and to our current situation“- Ai Weiwei
Museum Exhibition Spotlight: Design Museum London / Ai Weiwei: Making Sense
Here he goes, picking up the pieces and making newly ordered sense. As the world continues to self-destruct, he will always have plenty of new materials to work with.
Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist living in exile, is well known for his art and activism. Not one to keep his opinions to himself Ai Weiwei has a restless mind. He questions, proves, provokes, challenges, investigates, and eventually executes his ideas across multiple disciplines in painting, sculpture, architecture, film, design, and curating. In close collaboration with the artist, the Design Museum in London organized this exhibition where the artist’s focus is design and its relation with progress/destruction.
The museum’s press release indicates that large site-specific installations constitute the foundation of the exhibition, with the artist employing Stone Age tools, Lego bricks, and hundreds of objects which he’s collected since the ’90s. The materials are spread all over the galleries, and organized in five fields; “Still Life”, “Left Right Studio Material, “Spouts”, “Untitled (Porcelain Balls)”, and “Untitled (Lego Incident)”.
Ai Weiwei’s recreation of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies uses Lego bricks, hia largest Lego work to date. To make the 15-meter Water Lilies #1, the artist used 650,000 LEGO bricks and 22 different colors. On the lower right-hand side of the piece, one sees a dark portal representing the door to the underground dugout in Xinjiang province where Ai and his father, Ai Qing, lived in forced exile in the 1960s.
“This major exhibition, developed in collaboration with the artist, will be the first to present his work as a commentary on design and what it reveals about our changing values. Through his engagement with material culture, Ai explores the tension between past and present, hand and machine, precious and worthless, construction and destruction.
The exhibition draws on Ai’s fascination with historical Chinese artefacts, placing their traditional craftsmanship in dialogue with the more recent history of demolition and urban development in China. The result is a meditation on value – on histories and skills that have been ignored or erased.” ~ Design Museum
London-based street artist, fine artist and muralist D*Face reminds us about the power of cinema as a comforting vehicle to escape reality. With Silver Screen Eye-Cons, his new show opening today at Wunderkammern, he takes well-known artwork from classic movies and customizes it with his visual vocabulary.
Whether these classics cause you to recall the soothing anonymity of a darkened movie theater and early childhood silver screens or the quick flick you just watched on your phone on the plane to Miami, classic artwork by artists often formed your perceptions and impressions. With his first solo exhibition here in Milan, D*Face culls work from his vast archives of movie memorabilia and invites you to his world of pop dreams, romantic idealism, terrifying characters of doomed days in Zombieland, and damsels in distress caught in the embrace of handsome knights trapped forever in the afterlife.
“With the Silver Screen Eye-Cons exhibition at Wunderkammern, DFace offers a wide range of his works and ideas, with some new elements. […] it should not be forgotten that it was the big screen that made DFace what he is. In fact, it was the 1980s when a very young Dean was thunderstruck by Michael J. Fox’s skateboard in Back to the Future, beginning a journey first into the world of skateboarding and then into the aesthetics of sticker art and street art. Perhaps this is also why DFace felt the need to contaminate old movie posters; proposing, for the Milan exhibition, a selection of Hollywood and Italian film posters: from Django to Platoon, from Il padrino to La mosca, passing through Scarface and Klaus Kinski’s Nosferatu. In these works DFace’s characters, brands, and style contaminate the posters and appropriate and desecrate them, transforming them into “aPOPalyptic” visions, to use a term dear to him.” -Silvano Manganaro
“Throughout the history of cinema, film has been used as a method of escaping reality. More so today than ever, we are allowed to exist in alternate realities which can be endlessly rewatched and revisited – never letting us down because we know how they start and end. […] Are these classics really as good as we hold them up to be, or is it time to take off the rose tints for a better look?” – D*Face
April is Earth Month and the 22nd of April is the dedicated day of the year to focus on planet Earth. The beautifully hued blue planet.
With that in mind, we wanted to show two photographs that speak volumes about our environment; the juxtaposition of images illustrates in a simple microcosmos what’s happening to the earth. During the winter, when the trees are bare and dormant, awaiting the arrival of Spring to show their true colors we notice how chocked full of plastic they are, especially in large cities like NY. It’s a sad sight. When the winds are strong the plastic breaks free of its constriction and is caught on tree branches – and eventually all the way into the oceans.
One feels for the trees and imagines having some sort of superpower to climb them and free them from the “invasive species” that are strangling their branches. But realistically, we can’t do that, can we? Climb every tree we see on the streets to liberate it from the unsightly man-made product?
Most of the plastic we see on trees is plastic deconstructed from either single-use plastic bags ; from the grocery store or possibly from industrial-grade plastic used in construction sites. Other times it may be from eighteen-wheelers transporting construction wood or heavy equipment or industrial-grade plastic wrap used to encase pallets that hold cardboard boxes on truck beds.
We can prevent this by being more self-aware of how we discard our waste. We could carry our own grocery bags. If we stop expecting or demanding plastic bags at the grocery store, they will stop offering them to us – a direct relationship. It’s important to advocate for systemic change by contacting companies and elected officials to urge them to prioritize sustainability and reduce our plastic use. We can all do our part to protect the planet and leave a healthier world for future generations. During this euphoria of spring may we also take a moment to appreciate the beauty of nature, like the Magnolia tree, and work to protect it.
With “La Pugna” (The Fight”) the Catalan artist leaves his fistprint on the walls that were built to contain the waters of río Besós (Besós river), which flows below sea levels through the neighborhood of Santa Coloma in the Spanish city of Barcelona. It’s an apt mural and title for an artist whose work is often imbued with messages about social justice, the environment, and human rights. His fight is the people’s fight, and the earth’s fight.
Once one of the most contaminated rivers in Europe, río Besós has seen a turnaround, and its waters flow again into the Mediterranean Sea free of pollutants. Its walled embankment follows the roughly 11 miles that snake through the city, providing much-needed green areas for its inhabitants to enjoy outdoor activities and enjoy nature.
But the story doesn’t end there. BesArt The River Museum, the art project under the umbrella of the municipality of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, the Mediterranean Association of Street Art, and the Royal Artistic Circle of Barcelona is born. The goal is to invite a constellation of local, national, and international artists to execute works of art on the river’s walls.
When the project is completed, Barcelona will boast one more cultural attraction among the already long list of landmarks that make the city a popular destination. If only its residents would come to grips with the inconveniences that a heavy flow of tourists causes them every year. No fighting, everyone!
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Happy Easter! Happy Passover! Merry Arrestmas!
This is an excellent time to be in New York because everything is in bloom, and for a moment, there is love in the air everywhere you look. Or is that just the legal weed they sell from the truck in front of your apartment the way they used to sell falafel?
This is s beautiful time
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Louis Masai, Jason Naylor, Voxx Romana, HOXXOH, Voxx, Optimo NYC, Vers, Jesus, Lasak, D.Z.L.T., Envio, MENY X, Krave, and Abuse.
Coming up May 1st will be the release date of the new self-published book by street artists/contemporary artists Saman & Sasan Oskouei called Object / Subject. They are also releasing a Box set, their first and will include a collection of selected prints along with the book.
If you are familiar with their conceptual pieces and their powerful resonance – like Our House Is On Fire, for example, you will be excited at the prospect of having an opportunity to have this Box set in your collection. As a special commemoration of their most recent 8 years of work – that has re-defined their vision, their reputation as contemporary artists, and their ability to profoundly render verdicts on the human condition – the new book will also include an essay by author and art critic Carlo McCormick.
Object / Subject Box set to be released on April 10th, 12 noon EST at oskoueistudio.com/shop
Saman & Sasan Oskouei. Break Free. Object / Subject Box SetSaman & Sasan Oskouei. Our House Is On Fire I. Object / Subject Box Set.Saman & Sasan Oskouei. Our House Is On Fire II. Object / Subject Box Set.Saman & Sasan Oskouei. Our House Is On Fire III. Object / Subject Box Set.
Object / Subject Box set to be released on April 10th, 12 noon EST. Click HERE to place your order.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Damien Hirst – The Beautiful Paintings
2. SHOE – UNMOVEMENT
3. TCK – STEEL DIVISION – THE VIDEO (BERLIN) Via I Love Graffiti
BSA Special Feature: Damien Hirst – The Beautiful Paintings
Yes, of course, you could make art like this, in fact, it looks like you do the lion’s share of creating this one online and he signs the print – but that is not the point of this video here today. Damien Hirst has a corner on branding and selling that many do not, and he has been commercially successful at it. From our perspective, if an artist wants to live on their creative work, all lessons are welcome!
Damien Hirst – The Beautiful Paintings. Or a master lesson on selling art.
SHOE – UNMOVEMENT
Careful when you slam on the breaks here, SHOE is driving the painting process, and it is terrain yet unmapped. This promotional video for UNMOVEMENT at the Curators Room is a solo exhibition by SHOE featuring his most recent body of work.
As explained by the artist, “The title ‘unmovement’ is inspired by the ever-present dichotomy of movement and stillness. While the painted surface of a work is a still object, the particles of the paint are constantly moving, as well as the material quality of the canvas itself: time consumes, and transforms. The crystallization of an impression is, however, present in the here and now, prompting a question concerning the nature of time and, inevitably, of change.”
SHOE UNMOVEMENT (Curated by Gabriel Rolt for The Curators Room)
7 April – 27 May, 2023
Location: The Curators Room – Art Chapel Amsterdam Prinses Irenestraat 19 AMSTERDAM
TCK – STEEL DIVISION – THE VIDEO (BERLIN) Via I Love Graffiti
This movie by the TCK CREW from Berlin was available by the end of 2022 for a very short time, a limited quantity of 100 pieces, and was sold out as quickly as it came.
Now it’s time to show you the full-length film here:
“From the underground to the top at last. A concentrated 35 minutes of TCK and their partners banging non-stop trains in your face. Mostly footage from 2011-2016 and a few more recent shots. No 4K, no drones, just trains. Berlin only.”
Graffiti Women from the BX in the BSA house for Women’s History Month, which is really every month as far as we’re concerned. Artist @lovenotes got together this wall for three other strong female creators @kaylovebx, @mrrs.bx, and @erotica67 – to represent nature, strength, and the beauty of the Boogie Down Bronx.
“The street art scene and the mural scene are abundant in NYC but I felt it was important to highlight amazing Graffiti Women from the Bronx who I’ve always admired and respected,” says Love Notes, “and who were in the streets painting cute street art years before its current aesthetic popularity.”
Painted on this wall for The Alleyry, a collective of artists for artists in Manhattan’s Freeman Alley, Love Notes says she’s keeping focus on the Bronx babes, the women who “have held it down in the male-dominated world of graffiti with their sick styles abd characters – keeping graff in the Bronx alive and reminding everyone Girls Can Get Down Too!”
Under the art organization A Wall Mural Projects initiative and in collaboration with the Dunbar Elementary School in Wynwood, Miami, an ambitious program to bring art to new generations keeps growing on campus. The mission statement of “A Wall Mural Project” makes it clear that this collective of artists is interested in planting the “art bug” early – and preferably in the environment of formal education – with the Dunbar school committed to highlighting the importance of the arts in general as crucial to pupils’ intellectual development.
Let’s hope that Florida Governor DeSantis has bigger fish to fry (or mice) and leaves these mural programs in the schools alone. The trend toward devolution in American schools has been sad to see in recent years. In the meantime, check out the cool walls at Dunbar Elementary.
Using a 1992 Buick Park Avenue as your painting utensil is completely normal in late capitalism. So is calling yourself Shoe.
In his latest exhibition, the graffiti writer and contemporary artist Niels Shoe Meulman takes us the extra mile inside his shiny blue “paintbrush,” crushing cans in the process, tracking patterns across the canvas in a smoothly violent kinetic joyride. Unlike other tools one uses to create paintings, this Buick is central to the show.
Did you guess that he would coin a term? The author of “Calligraffiti” may imagine that this automotive move into contemporary art will be adopted by other’s who want to write with a steering wheel. In promotion of this UNMOVEMENT, “the artist reached what he semi-ironically calls Carrigraffiti: signs, interventions, actual paintings created by using his car as a tool.”
Niels SHOE Meulman. ZERO KELVIN (MINUS 273 DEGREES CELSIUS). (photo courtesy of The Curators Room)
Can you imagine a branding collaboration with Formula 1 racers and, say Montana Colors, as curated by the driver at the head of the pack, Shoe? What would that track look like? And would it be contemporary art?
Sara van Bussel, the art curator, researcher, and writer based in Milan, tells us this work is of the moment. “If everything is the contrary of everything we find ourselves here,” she says, “in the midst of a still movement, a temporal interval in the constant transformation of matter, absorbing Shoe’s work as precisely what it is: the paradox of our time.”
Niels SHOE Meulman. ALL DISORDER DISAPPEARS. (photo courtesy of The Curators Room)
SHOE /// 2023
The Curators Room is proud to announce UNMOVEMENT, a solo exhibition by SHOE featuring his most recent body of work.
(in cooperation with Niels Shoe Meulman, Amsterdam and Gabriel Rolt, Barcelona)
Niels SHOE Meulman. NOTHING CAN BE COLDER. (photo courtesy of The Curators Room)Niels SHOE Meulman. ON AND UNDER THE VULCANO. (photo courtesy of The Curators Room)Niels SHOE Meulman. PERMANENTLY CLOSED. (photo courtesy of The Curators Room)Niels SHOE Meulman. Process shot. (photo courtesy of The Curators Room)Niels SHOE Meulman. Process shot. (photo courtesy of The Curators Room)
SHOE UNMOVEMENT(Curated by Gabriel Rolt for The Curators Room) Click HERE for additional information. 7 April – 27 May, 2023 🥂Opening: Friday, 7 April, 17 – 21 hrs
Video by: Sander Lanen Live DJ set by: Cristel Ball
Location: The Curators Room – Art Chapel AmsterdamPrinses Irenestraat 19 AMSTERDAM
Elfo is a graffiti writer and social commentator whose work intentionally sidesteps traditional notions of style or technical lettering. This …Read More »
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