BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
OTHER Talks About His Process and His New Show, “Thinkers of This”
Found stories on found objects. The Canadian Street Artist named Troy Lovegates AKA Other is just as surprised as anyone by the faces and forms and shapes and patterns that come spilling out onto his wood panels and canvasses. A collector of images and experiences, he has a penchant for travel, a continuous movement, self propelling his eyes past a static world as a way of animating his own streaming movie without much narrative. His bendable figures, pungent geometric patterns, and somber faced old white men all get tumbled together in a clothes dryer with whatever else has collected in his consciousness, or subconscious. A hard wired natural trust of the intuitive sense leads him to his work, or his work to him, he doesn’t really know.
Troy Lovegates AKA Other. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Brooklyn Street Art: You’ve got a lot of stuff that is always spilling out of you in your work. Do these things mill around inside or do you discover them as they are coming out?
Other: I just do patches and chunks. I don’t really know what I’m doing until it is finished. Sometimes I have a basic concept but with this globby gushing stuff, I think it’s just cities and life and travel and all the junk that you go through – all mashed together. I’m a big fan of clutter. Maybe that’s why I travel so much because once you get me stopped, my space gets so full. I like clutter and repetition.
Troy Lovegates AKA Other. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
The cities and countries he’s been in over the last couple of years also tumble out while he is showing BSA his new show, a double bill opening tonight at Brooklynite with Colombian Street Artist Stinkfish: he’s been wandering through Germany, Croatia, Romania, France, Spain, Catalonia, Italy, Argentina. – A lot of it by bicycle, a lot of it on foot.
“I’m a walker and a biker and I’ll go out in the morning and I’ll walk till midnight. And I’m usually searching for something I can paint on – one of my next pieces. This work is “storytelling” and the stories happen while I’m searching. It’s my favorite way to produce art. Like you could maybe even find some paint, and an old part of a church, just an amazing old piece of wood. It’s stories that happen along the way, the work just comes to you,” says Other as he describes the process.
Troy Lovegates AKA Other. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
The show hangs together with glee, an unusual arrangement of usual things. Other’s work is a blind awareness, a collecting of the faces and handbags and mop buckets and shapes and patterns that he has ingested. Then like the piles of belongings that clump together in after flood waters descend, Other ignores relative value or hierchy in the delivery of heads and plumbers pipes and patterns and alarm clocks. On his daylong explorations through cities and towns and roads and streets he keeps his eyes open, looking into faces and into dark shadows and dilapidated buildings.
Brooklyn Street Art: And what about the heads? Who are these people?
Other: I like to collect old magazines. I get these pictures of famous people and then look in the back ground and say “Oh that guy would be great to paint” I was taking a lot of photos.
Brooklyn Street Art: People you meet on the street?
Other: I ask them, “Can I take a photo of you?”
Brooklyn Street Art: Do you ask them anything about themselves?
Other: No. I usually can see a lot.
Stinkfish. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Stinkfish. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Stinkfish in the back yard. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Troy Lovegates AKA Other in the back yard. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Troy Lovegates AKA Other in the back yard. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Troy Lovegates AKA Other in the back yard. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Troy Lovegates AKA Other in the back yard. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Troy Lovegates AKA Other in the back yard. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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Read more about the show “Thinkers of This” at Brooklynite Gallery HERE
Read our interview with Troy Lovegates AKA OTHER on Juxtapoz this summer HERE
