photography © courtesy Sam Davol

Pop-ups–boutique, market or museum have entered the psyche of hip New Yorkers, but if you are really lucky, you will have experienced the pop-up library known as the Uni Project.

Part-library, part-performance space, the Uni Project, a portable library kiosk with curated cubes, popped up on a stretch of waterfront at the Gantry State Park in Long Island City, Queens on the first day of fall. The blustery weather wrestled with the portable bookshelves and seats, but passersby, especially the short, cute variety with parents hovering close by, intuitively browsed, read and celebrated books, played games and explored portable worm bins for indoor composting.

photography © courtesy Sam Davol

The objective of Leslie and Sam Davol’s non-profit initiative is to unite a community through reading and learning. By partnering with the Queen’s Library and the Friends of the Hunters Point Library on the locale which will be the dedication site for the new library branch on October 5, 2012,  they gave the emerging neighborhood in Hunters Point, directly across from the United Nations on the East River, a taste of the future library branch.

Writer David St.-Lascaux shares, “When I was a child, bookmobiles brought the wonder of books – which are, after all, doors to learning about everything, the telling of our stories, and the magic of imagination – to my neighborhood. Now the Uni Project promises to bring the wonder of books to children in the nurturing company of their parents and caregivers. The Uni Project is truly a kinder-garten where books are the earth in which young minds flower.”

photo © courtesy Allen Joseph Epstein

With the help of local community leaders, their self-aware family members, and volunteer librarians, the founders of the Uni Project clearly understand that libraries are communities and about communities.  Unifying communities with books is a worthwhile cause.

photo © courtesy Allen Joseph Epstein

BMW Guggenheim Lab exterior view from East 1st Street, NYC (Photo: Paul Warchol)

Last winter I stood on a cold subway platform and told Y about my new crush: David van der Leer. “Who is he?” she asked, distracted. She was peering down the dark tunnel, hoping to see train lights headed our way. It was one of those very snowy late nights in New York, and we had fallen victim to the slow timetable of weekend trains. I don’t know, I said. Some curator at the Guggenheim. Y turned her gaze on me. “You don’t even know who this dude is?” she asked. I shrugged and told her I liked what he’d been curating. She shook her head. Who falls for someone’s curation?

In van der Leer’s case, lots and lots. Google him and up comes one article and interview after the other profiling either the assistant curator himself or the shows in which he’s had a hand. The man has fans. That’s how I came across van der Leer—reading an admiring write-up about the Frank Lloyd Wright show he’d assisted with and then later when I was researching Futurefarmers, a San Francisco-based art collective he brought to New York last spring. Then, one warm, rainy night last June, a friend and I happened upon Pedro Reyes’s Sanatorium, the first in the stillspotting nyc series van der Leer oversees. The pop-up exhibition was held in a high-ceilinged storefront in MetroTech—that curious, liminal area of downtown Brooklyn—and it featured men and women in lab coats offering spiritual and physical ministrations beneath fluorescent lights. The severe sterility of the space recalled hospitals, a nice counterpoint to the typically warm and busy aesthetic of New Age therapies. (Think here of the myrrh-scented, cluttered woo-woo shops along Bleeker, and you’ll know what I mean.)

Like elements of the Futurefarmers exhibition, stillspotting nyc roams outside of the Guggenheim’s famously curved walls. The transient and mobile quality of the installations is replicated in the BMW Guggenheim Lab, an ambitious, multidisciplinary arts showcase that will travel to nine cities around the world in six years. It launched in the East Village last fall, when the public could choose from myriad happenings—lectures, block parties, tours of toxic sites—offered by the lab, which claimed “comfort” as the topic under its microscope. It next travels to Berlin, where the lab will appear in a different incarnation in May. (Plan ahead now; Berlin is lovely in the spring.) Stillspotting nyc also continues apace this spring, extending the migratory reach of the Guggenheim, perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of van der Leer’s curation thus far. I spoke to him about his efforts with the lab, which he co-curates with Maria Nicanor, and his curatorial approach and found out why so many find the curator worth profiling.

BMW Guggenheim Lab site before construction (Photo: Kristopher McKay)

CL: Why did you choose comfort as the first topic for the BMW Guggenheim Lab to study?
David van der Leer: We were looking for themes that are slightly emotional, that people can respond to without having a big knowledge of the themes you would normally associate with cities. Domestic space is usually related to comfort, so when people hear “comfort,” they immediately think of a fluffy bed and all that kind of stuff, but not necessarily about what comfort means in a city. If we ask people very specifically what’s “comfort” in a city context, they usually respond, “Oh yes, a park along the river,” but what does it mean when you start to confront those notions?

CL: Tell us about where the lab will be traveling.
DvdL: It’s important for us to go to bigger cities and cities all around the world. Smaller cities are also interesting, but I think that’s a different project. For instance, I’d love to do a project on suburbia, but this project is built to look at metropolises around the world. Berlin is a little smaller, but, all in all, they’re quite big cities.

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“I think as soon as you take something out of the museum and place it in an urban context, it becomes a very different animal. It becomes something that people can respond to … If we had done the same installations at the museum, it would have been impressive but not as effective.”

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CL: How do you think a larger city versus a smaller city or the different regions informs the themes of each two-year cycle?
DvdL: Some of the bigger issues in cities, such as transportation and housing, become a little more sharp in even bigger cities, so that’s why it’s interesting for us to look at the biggest places. I think it will differ from city to city and will be based on what the lab team does. In New York, it was fairly abstract because the team decided to look at the city as a system. In Berlin, it will be a very different project, much more practical. Also, the public programs around it will shift and change.

CL: Urban issues seem to be of programmatic interest for curators. There was the Global Cities show at the Tate Modern in 2007 and last year the Festival of Ideas for the New City organized by the New Museum. Why or how are urban issues a curatorial concern?
DvdL: One of my frustrations if you look at this type of show is you get a lot of photography. You get a lot of diagramming and maps, and they give you a sense of the reality of cities. They almost want to say, “Okay, we understand the city,” whereas I think the complete opposite. All of those tools are very valuable and helpful, but I don’t think we understand cities at all.

I think it’s important to approach it from another end, which is why we created a project that was much more about people than about the data that’s all subjective anyway. We created a project where people would be the core element of all the conversations, and at times there are poetic moments.

Diagram illustrating one venue of the BMW Guggenheim Lab

CL: What makes you say we haven’t figured cities out?
DvdL: I don’t think we can know what a perfect city is. We know how to create utopias on paper, but utopia has never materialized. You get driven by how a city is organized, and here especially the grid system creates a fairly anxious city. You never stop. It has to do with city form and the organization of cities.

CL: You mentioned poetry a little while ago, and you’ve referenced it in previous interviews. The poetic or lyrical seems to be valuable to you. How does it show up in your curation?
DvdL: I think it’s nice when things aren’t necessarily catered to a conclusion or an answer. I like it when projects are more layered, and people need to find their way through it.  It’s basically way-finding, which I think happens with the lab, as well as in stillspotting. Futurefarmers, too. You run into things you may not have expected. That can be fairly poetic.

CL: Why is way-finding a preferred approach for you, and what do you think it offers visitors?
DvdL: Everything is so direct in how we live our lives that, for something to really have an effect, you sometimes have to do the opposite. More intriguing can be super effective. For instance, with stillspotting, we’re running two years of programming on stillness around New York. Normally, you would start off with numbers—”Noise is bad for this reason”—and we’re using that type of language, but we’re trying to get people to go to one or three or perhaps all of them and realize, “This is something I could find myself, too, without necessarily having to make drastic changes in my life.”

CL: You’re so focused on the internal architecture of the visitor. Can you speak to that?
DvdL: Things can be so, so direct. It’s fairly easy to get people to have an emotion, but these projects are less direct in terms of information. They can go to the core in a different way. For instance, with stillspotting, I could’ve made a show with fifty objects all nice and beautiful, and it would’ve been a nice and quiet show. But I think as soon as you take something out of the museum and place it in an urban context, it becomes a very different animal. It becomes something that people can respond to. In the museum, it becomes abstract. If we had done the same installations at the museum, it would have been impressive but not as effective.

CL: How do you judge effectiveness?
DvdL: Getting some emotion out of people. When you’re emotional, it’s sometimes easy to learn something, and that’s something we’re trying to get at. People respond very positively and sometimes very negatively, but I like that there is some sort of response to things. Otherwise, the type of show you referred to earlier is important and interesting, but it’s very difficult to respond to it. You pick up some information, and that’s usually it.

CL: So how would you advise someone interested in becoming a curator?
DvdL: I’m the worst example actually, because many curators are probably art historians and often know for a long time that they want to be a curator. I’m trained in urban and architectural theory and then worked for architects and ended up here not entirely by accident, but it was some sort of accident. What I’m trying to say is for some curators there’s definitely a path and it’s very logical, but it can have a little bit of a twist.

CL: Right, you don’t have the same perspective.
DvdL: Well, I share many of the same perspectives, but I’m less driven by objects. In many cases, curators are forced to think about objects. That’s the nice thing about our projects. They’re either about discussions or emotions, and often an object is a part of that but it doesn’t have to be so romanticized.

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Cielo Lutino is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor covering culture, urban, and technology topics for clients including Econsultancy, NYU-Polytechnic Institute, and Bloomberg Businessweek, where she is a weekend editor.

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All images courtesy of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Friday, April 8, “Dear Japan We Love You” opened at OPENHOUSE GALLERY on 201 Mulberry Street NYC, another great silent auction benefit curated by our friends Tanya Arakawa Rosenstein, Will Robins, and Foundation World. There was something for everyone with a focus on urban art, and people were quick to scribble in their bids hoping to snatch up pieces by David Ellis, Kenzo Minami, Shepard Fairey, Swoon and more at a 10th of the market value.  A painting by Jose Parla was going for $5,500!

From the producers:

3.11 Project was conceptually created by Yuko Arakawa, one of the producers, who was motivated to start this project because she is from the prefecture of Fukushima in Japan. Her hometown is only 70 miles away from the Nuclear Power Plant, and she is heartbroken by this devastating disaster that has affected her place of origin and her family. Instead of feeling helpless, she is compelled to find a way to give back to her country and to her community. 3.11 is an on-going project that will continue to strive not only to raise money, but to raise awarenes for the victims of northern Japan that were affected by the Tsunami, Earthquake, and Nuclear Radiation.

100% proceeds of all projects we produce will be donated to Japan Earthquake Relief Fund via Japan Society.

Naomi Kazama

Mika Ninagawa

Will Robbins

Swoon

David Ellis

Tanya Arakawa Rosenstein

"Wild Child Hand Style" 2010, © Jose Parla

Artists and brothers, Jose and Rey Parla each have unique and recognizable visions. Born into a family of Cuban exiles, they moved to Puerto Rico at very early ages to return to Miami again before they were teenagers. They both currently live and work in Brooklyn, NY. Two weeks ago I had a studio visit with Jose and Rey. Knowing each other since the year 2000 we caught up about their latest projects. It was such a thrill to see all of the work – finished or in progress, their work truly moves me.

Jose’s bodies of work, particularly his paintings, are a combination of memories and experiences, from the many cities he has moved through since childhood and throughout his life. Through these diverse locations, each painting holds the textures, colors and pulse of each place. The walls in which he draws direct inspiration from, hold years of decay and neglect from the layers of paint, to decades of old posters.

"Scratch Graph 1" 2007, © Rey Parla

Rey creates abstract works, which combine film, photography, paint and ink materials. These images are not computer-generated, but are hand-manipulated experimental motion picture based works that create a new kind of a “non-photo” photograph.

Jose Parlá’s works have appeared in major exhibitions in London, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Paris, and recently in Stages for the Livestrong Foundation at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris, Deitch Projects, New York, and O.H.W.O.W in Miami. This summer both Rey and Jose were part of the traveling exhibition, The New Grand Tour at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery.

Just in time for Art Basel, The Parla Brothers will be showing at: It Aint Fair 2010, O.H.W.O.W Gallery, Art Basel Miami Beach 2010 from December 2 – January 8, 2011.

"Calle Luna" 2003, © Jose Parla

"International Hermetic Celestial System" 2005, © Jose Parla

Carissa Pelleteri:  How is it working together as brothers?

Jose Parla: Rey and I have been having conversation about art and philosophy since we were kids. We’ve always been best friends and also kept great friends around us who are creative and share into our lifestyle as artists.  It is very natural for us as brothers to build work together. We’ve often felt that it is, us against the world, and that we are lucky to have each other. We both love making art and use art as a way to defeat our struggles.

Rey Parla: José and I have been working together since our early teens. We have always encouraged and inspired each other to set challenges for personal creative work that carries in it a dialogue for our ongoing conversations about life and art. Working together once again is a natural progression through time that has further matured into a mutual synergy of thoughts and ideas we have fun in sharing with each other.

" Homage to Stan Brakhage's Love Song" 2010, © Rey Parla

CP:  In the earlier years Jose, you painted the walls with the name “Ease” and Rey, you experimented with Super 8 film and shot photographs.

JP: The name Ease comes from 1983 when I first got introduced to Hip-Hop culture by our friend Jesus Ortiz in Miami. He and Rey gave me the name one day after school when we were practicing break-dancing. I used the name Ease for 25 years steadily and after our father passed away, I used the name less and less. Now I use my given name being that it is the same as my father’s name.

RP:  For a while I wrote – Faz, but after voluntarily deciding to document the writing scene in Miami starting in the early 1980s and successfully creating an archive of photographs of the writing subculture in our hometown, I then fully turned my lens on my brother José. I was using various cameras back then and it was all from a self-taught perspective. The documentation on Super 8 film was also DIY. I was involved with the Alliance Film & Video Co-operative on Miami Beach and was able to rent Super 8 and 16mm cameras after taking some courses there. My first Super 8 film was a short abstract documentary on José, titled:  An Experimental Introduction to a Segmented Reality. I continued to document our friends and José painting and also worked on three short absolute films in the tradition of Visual Music animation. The films were all screened at film festivals and galleries in Miami during the 90s.

"Writers End Pages" Sketch book 2000 - 2008, © Jose Parla

CP:  Jose, When did you have your first inclination to take your street graffiti to canvas on a grand scale?  Was there a magic moment or chain of events that lead to this?

JP: What I was doing on walls around the city was always the same as painting on canvas to me.  The only difference is that people were interested in collecting the canvases. At the same time I was painting walls, I would keep sketchbooks and would also practice painting on canvas since I was very young.  During the mid-eighties I was aware of the work New York writers like: Lee, Futura, Crash and Daze and even Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring were making. I was interested in making works on canvas and at the same time to remain very true to painting around the city as well. The first time I was part of an underground art exhibition was probably in 1988 before I earned a scholarship to study art in Savannah, Georgia.  By 1989, although I was still heavy into painting walls, I was making paintings on canvas in a grand scale as well.

"Brothers Back 2 Back" 2006, © Jose Parla

CP: Tell me about “Brothers Back 2 Back.”

JP: The painting, Brothers Back to Back, was made in 2006. This painting is made in the style of a palimpsest and is layered with the writing of many memories shared between Rey and I as brothers growing up in Miami. There was a lot of tension and danger in the streets when we were kids, and maybe it is still like that, but not quite like in the 1980s I think.  Brothers Back to Back was the saying we had to mean we would protect each other. Its meaning was that we could see if anyone was coming at us from any direction. Originally I made a drawing in 1987 that was of Rey and I standing in B-Boy poses with our backs to each other.

CP:  Jose, your paintings come from locations around the world and life experiences.  Are there specific cultures or subcultures, which have had a major impact in your work?

JP: Traveling in general has always been a major part of my inspiration. Even as kids, traveling into new neighborhoods and discovering new places to paint was a great experience.  We were together with a crew of other artists searching and discovering new hidden train tracks, freight trains, trucks, or rooftop walls around the city on which to paint.  This expanded as I evolved into traveling to other cities to go paint as well. Later on after seeing so many parts of different cities, I had noticed that so much of what I was looking at was deteriorated walls, abandoned buildings, old train stations, with mold on the walls, rust marks, years of writing on walls layered over each other, paint peeling away and exposing written tags underneath, layers of posters also peeling and exposing more of the walls’ histories.  During my travels I would see walls like this everywhere in London, Tokyo, Beijing, Havana, Istanbul, San Salvador and many other cities.  All of this started to inform my paintings.  A painting professor of mine once said that a painting must have history within it and I liked very much her philosophy.  I wanted to create transparencies in my work and by using the walls as a point of departure I felt it was natural being that at that point I had been around walls for most of my life.

"Soho, Manhattan Circa 1981" 2008, © Jose Parla

CP:  Jose, tell me more about the Concord Project, commissioned by the city of Toronto. Those murals are huge!

JP: The two mural paintings were commissioned by Concord City Place in Toronto for the lobbies of two residential buildings. One is sixty-five feet in length and the second is thirty-five feet in length. I made them both in my Brooklyn studio and we recently installed them in their permanent location in downtown Toronto.  The larger one is titled:  The Names that Live and Sometimes Fade while Time Flies.  This is a painting made of layers of names. The painting pays homage to artists who I admire and have worked with, some who are friends as well.  The smaller painting is titled:  The Bridge. It pays homage to the city, which to me is like a bridge, which allows me to get across and to do the things I dream of.

"Intuitive Provocation. Redacted Frame No. 9" 2010, © Rey Parla

CP:  Rey, what are your influences and inspirations in how you create your work?

RP: During my teenage years and up to my early twenties, I really enjoyed and thought about the work of Futura 2000 as well as the writers influenced by a style called, Computer Rock.  We didn’t fully call this Graffiti back then, the media labeled it that way. For us it was a self-taught, DIY realm, maybe we can even call it outsider art or folk street art created on the subway trains of New York City during the 70’s and 80s.  The colors, the abstractions and the idea of art moving and being viewed momentarily was and remains a hyper kinetic influence that is substantial to my artistic vision.

I was turned on to filmmaking by my father who had made some short films at the ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry) and began to film my friends and brother José doing their works on walls in around Florida, Georgia and New York State.  Only after I was heavily involved and living the art of documenting the writing subculture in Miami and the East coast, and being influenced by my brother’s painting philosophy and methods did I accidentally create a film titled: Sporadic Germination.  The experience of making and screening this film along Stan Brakhage’s work and the work of Jose Antonio Sistiaga from Spain at The Miami International Film Festival:  The Avant-Garde Returns, introduced me to the vast experimental film canon world wide.  These early experiences continue to influence and inspire me to create new works.

"HYPER. Scratch Graph" 2010, © Rey Parla

CP:  Rey, tell me about your new work HYPER:  Scratch | Graph, which is being shown at O.H.W.O.W.’s  It Ain’t Fair group show.

RP: This particular new piece continues my physical “haptic” approach to image making. I have always been interested in opacity, transparency, the layering of marks, and their effects. With this work I have combined various working methods from light experiments conducted in my motion picture based works where I have manipulated both positive and negative space. I am drawing with light and also creating a new kind of photograph.

The inspiration for HYPER: Scratch | Graph comes from the idea of capturing the times now. Our story now is one of hyperkinetic activity of interconnected networks, firewalls, masks, sub-pseudo identities, waves of psycho-geographical mental layers continuously discovering and exploring the new sea of shared knowledge.  Lines, human lines and boundless borders.  A handcrafted mirror reflecting the image of the world as we know it.  The work is about the future of now which registers our constant flux, our movements and at the same time a hyper static contraction into a memory of the past, a part of death and rebirth that seem to always inform the human condition, the piece is an abstract representation of our present nature.

artists website:

joseparla.com / reyparla.com

Photos: Jenna Duffy for Artcards

For months, after the last Shepard Fairey show at the Deitch in SoHo, I have always wondered what would come next. Luckily it wasn’t another boutique. Last month Levi’s launched a playground for photo fanatics. We all know that Levi’s is a pioneer in denim wear, but not everyone is familiar with Deitch Projects, which pioneered in its own right as a gallery for street and contemporary art. To give a little background (and props) to the gallery, since its beginnings in 1996 the Deitch has housed a roster of artists such as Keith Haring, Shepard Fairey, Yoko Ono, Jon Kessler, Swoon, Mariko Mori, Os Gemeos, and Clare Rojas. Today, the spirit still survives through the Levi’s Photo Workshop with guest collaborators having their work exhibited along with the program. A Levi’s photobooth is appropriately installed in the space, although not as an installation, but as a complimentary booth for everyone. Call it a corporate marketing scheme, but who cares when you can shoot, print, scan, and rent photo equipment completely for free. A complete list of collaborating artists can be found here. Scroll down for more photos.

Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation

I first stumbled upon the paintings of Mark Warren Jacques at Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn. His small, radiant paintings hit me in the face. Mark’s paintings are characteristic of his personality: heady and amorous, and tempered with a languid playfulness. His brightly hued canvases combine a humble, DIY sensibility with otherworldly yearnings and an almost sublime aesthetic. His newest exhibit, I’m Here Now at Gallery Hijinks in San Francisco is open until November 15th. Last week I had the opportunity to talk to the artist about the show, his art, and future plans.

No one knows where we go when we are dead and when we are sleeping

I'm Here Now

You were staying in SF for several months preceding the show. How has this experience impacted you and your work? Would you go back?
I moved out of my house in Portland in the spring to travel for exhibitions and with the Free Life Center art tour which ended in September in San Fran. I was actually planning to live in S.F. for a while up to and after the show, maybe even move there more permanently. I’ve sort of been living between S.F. and Portland for a while. When I had decided that the show would be titled I’m Here Now I also made a conscious decision to really let myself open up to be inspired by being there, in that place, at that time. Letting this new “home” dictate how to feel and in turn what type of work to make. This I came to find out was a dangerous decision, almost the opposite of what people do in large cities typically. You’re supposed to harden and look away from all the grime, the people in despair on the streets, the trash, the drugs, all the downers, you know. But I put myself in this mindset to be fully influenced by it, to let it come into me and it’s not that there isn’t beauty in S.F. too, but the downers were what i was seeing, and i think by opening up like that I ultimately had to embrace these things, and to turn them around in my mind and in my visual language. It was really difficult for me to be inspired by that. It was hard to be happy, but it was good, I learned, I forced it, I hated it and I loved it. I think quite a few of the pieces are leaps forward for me, leaps that would not have come in my little rainy Portland bubble.

Live is so unfair but I go along without a care

How does your relationship with other mediums, film, music, skateboarding impact your artistic process? Do you view your painting outside of these activities?
In some ways I take myself a little more seriously with the painting, or visual art stuff because now there is an audience and I feel a real honor and sense of responsibility that comes with that. I see how lucky I am to be a full time artist and I think I have a voice that I want to be heard clearly when it comes to the painting, but I really believe that for me to be happy I have to believe that no matter what I’m up to, whether it’s painting, or skateboarding, or music, or drinking beer with friends, I gotta be myself, you know, stay true to how I feel and how I see, to not let anything hinder me from staying connected to myself.

You are a moon appearing

You just got done touring all Summer with your project Free Life Center. Would you mind describing the project for our readers? What was the impetus?
For the Free Life Center project I collaborated with a long time artist friend Seth Neefus to create this transient installation. It seems easiest to describe the project as a movable “gallery” space / shack, built in a modular fashion of salvaged and reclaimed materials. At its full size the structure is a pretty large free standing building (10 ft wide x 16 ft long x 10ft tall), complete with lighting, a tin roof and a wood floor. Seth and I actually lived in the space a few times throughout the tour, indoors and out. Since we designed the building to come apart in sections, we had the option to vary the size of the installation to fit the environment it was housed within. We also built the structure in manageable pieces to allow us to travel, which is exactly what we’ve been doing this summer, an art tour. At each location along the journey we’ve been setting up the structure and filling it with our artworks, video works, process documentation, interactive installation elements, good vibes, and our music that we would perform live. Along with our own artworks we asked members of each local community to join in. We’ve had a ton of friends play music, dance, draw, jam, sleep, eat, and hang with us in and around the installation. So yeah, installation, art, video, music, art tour, curating guest performance, performing, documentation, its all a part of the project, and in a lot of it was a lifestyle we are in pursuit of. Everything was free, all were welcome, and given the impermanence of the installation in each place, I think the audience was really open to experience the whole thing as an idea. Sort of a once in a lifetime thing, which is exactly how the tour felt for me too. It was really fun, and inspiring.

To paint is to draw influence from life, aside from direct experience, what inspires you to paint?
I’m sure there are other things that I’m not aware of, but I would say direct experience is the only real inspiration. Wow when I think like that, I think how I’m feeling more and more convinced that I’m living in a real world, or a real reality, and that I need to make things that prove it. Maybe I make things to prove to myself that I’m alive, that any of this is real.

Work is Love Made Visible

What’s next? Big plans for the next year?
Next is a solo show in Portland at Together Gallery opening December 4. A group show in Barcelona at Art & Design Barcelona in late December. Then I’m going back to my hometown in Ohio to be with my sister while she has her first child. Through the winter I’m gonna try to write a feature film, and then make it in the spring. That sounds ambitious huh. Then back to painting for shows in S.F., Seattle, and Baltimore next Summer. I want to manifest a show in New York sometime next year. Where should I do a show at in New York?

Favorite skate spot?
Adam, David, and I have been skating every nice day since I’ve been back in Portland, anywhere with them is a favorite. Specifically though I really like the skatepark at Hood River in Oregon. The whole park is built into the woods, with creeks running through it and transitions up trees, it’s amazing.

(All images courtesy of Gallery Hijinks and the artist)

This weekend New York Times writer Jasper Rees broke the street art story of the year. The story, which has prompted a wildfire rash of blog postings, revolves around “The Underbelly Project.” Street artists Workhorse and PAC curated a selection of some 150 international street artists, inviting each to paint a mural in one night on the walls of an unidentified, unfinished abandoned subway station four stories underground. The exhibition was opened to a select group of journalists and bloggers for one night, and then closed forever, when the gorilla curators destroyed the entrance. The list of artists is incredible: Dan Witz, Faile, Swoon, Anthony Lister and Jeff Soto to name just a few. More details on Vandalog.

(photos by RJ Rushmore, Workhorse and PAC)

Friday, October 1st, 2010 at noon
Allen Street Pedestrian Malls (between Houston & Delancey)

painting by Sylvia Ji

A thick cloud of people accumulated outside The Luggage Store Gallery (SF) on Friday night to witness the 10th anniversary of Fecal Face. Fecal Face started back in 2000 when the punk rock skater kid, John Trippe started showcasing artists he thought were rad online at fecal face dot com. Since 2000, Fecal Face has developed a cycle in which “the artists that gravitate towards us are also the same artists that we lean towards” (Trippe).

The Luggage Store Gallery

On Friday night, many of those artists came out to show their work and appreciation for Fecal Face, renowned to be an open space to nurture art. All three floors of The Luggage Store Gallery were packed with works of art from every medium imaginable. True to the free style of Fecal Face the entire bottom floor was spray-painted to make the room itself a work of art. I had already seen many of the pieces displayed in the show online, which made seeing these tangible pieces like visiting old friends. An awesome level of diversity was created by showcasing 28 artists, which ensured there was a piece for everyone to adore. Also, many of the pieces boasted a level of craftsmanship that would impress any onlooker, such as Maya Hayuk’s three dimensional mural. The only thing this show lacked was artist labels. Other than that, the tri-level 10 year anniversary show is what I imagine Fecal Face gallery could always be. The show is up for one month, which is horribly short for such a historic and incredible show, so come see it while you can.

FECAL FACE DOT COM 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY SHOW
September 10th – October 9th, 2010

mural by Maya Hayuk

stencil by Shepard Fairey

photo by Tod Seelie

Clown Soldier and Gaia

Gaia and Clown Soldier have just gotten back from the Living Walls Conference in Atlanta. They told me the event was amazing, hanging out and connecting with other street artists, and just having the freedom to create on the streets. Photos from a previous post here.

The street artist Clown Soldier had told me to visit this mural in Bushwick a while back. The painted mural on Waterbury and Meserole, a dusty industrial block, is a collaboration of Clown Soldier and Gaia. It was commissioned by the owners of that lovely hummus cafe – Yummus Hummus – across the street. Smaller pieces of both artists’ works were spotted along the way, prelude to the “wall”, almost heightening the anticipation to the larger mural. Approaching the wall, the colorful and whimsical style of Clown Soldier is instantly recognizable, crossing the line between pop art, collage, and street art. Although Clown Soldier is new to the graf scene, he’s been progressively wheat-pasting and tagging it up. In contrast, Gaia’s style is darker and metaphorical, but when juxtaposed together it creates a strikingly beautiful balance, and the amount of thought that went into it is apparent. It is still work in progress, with large empty areas to be filled by Rambo, and Gaia can only work on it while he visits New York. Based in Baltimore, Gaia has just returned from a month of independent study in Seoul, Korea. Over the course of one month, he consistently painted on the streets, creating these monumental works of art in unexpected spots. I envy those Seoul citizens who are able to enjoy them and maybe wondering who had landed and bombed the city with these prophetic creatures. Being a street artist anywhere isn’t easy, especially in New York City where it’s been cleaned up since less than a decade ago. But while the city has to deal with graffiti issues, on the other hand a lot of shop owners appreciates street art and readily commission those artists to muralize their shop surroundings.

In December both artists, Gaia and Clown Soldier, are planning to head down to Miami for Art Basel, climbing and painting more walls.

Photos: 1, 3-5 (Carissa Pelleteri)  2 (Clown Soldier)