Caitlin Masley at her studio in DUMBO. (Image: Carissa Pelleteri)

Looking at Baltimore’s busted-out vacancies last weekend, with their broken, boarded-up windows and exhausted dereliction, I couldn’t help but think of a phrase the artist Caitlin Masley used when we spoke in January: “monuments to failure.” It’s an interesting description, because monuments tend to valorize failure’s opposite: success and the heroic triumphs of civilization. Beyond recognizing fallen soldiers and epic battles, monuments reserve their monumentality for the great and the good. Yet so much of life is neither great nor good, and if reality is to be preserved in statuary, isn’t it equally worth capturing the sad defeats of life? And if we were to pursue that idea, would we need to go much farther than the half-built developments littering so much of America today? Aren’t their shells evidence of stock market failure and an inability to curb our greed for more land, more profit?

Those are the kinds of questions Masley’s artworks prompt. Her sculptures, drawings, installations, and photography speak to the hoped-for futures humans conjure and then leave behind, whether in their imaginations or here in the material world. There is, for instance, “TWOTOWERSVER2,” a manipulated photo of an imaginary landscape in postwar reconstruction, and “Copperland,” a series of abstract drawings overlaid in copper leafing. In the works, dense clusters of human habitation are seen from a bird’s-eye view, with some sections darkened as if erased, the whole of it suggesting a desert landscape—El Paso at night maybe, or, more likely, bombed villages in the Middle East.

"Neo Habitat" at Smack Mellon, January 2011. Image courtesy of the artist.

We discussed her work, which was part of a group show at Smack Mellon a few months ago.  In the interlude, Masley had her second child and began preparing for the upcoming group show “Blind Faith” at NP Contemporary Art Center. Me, I worked very hard on multiple jobs and thought I would die, yet it’s doubtful my efforts were as productive as that of the prolific and talented Masley. Below is our talk.

What is it about space and place that captivates you?

I have to be a little cheesy and say it comes from my childhood. I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, which was an experimental town. I didn’t realize what kind of place it was until I went to West Virginia to go to college. After being in Morgantown a couple of months, I was, like, Oh my god, this place is so ugly. I don’t want to be here. Then I was, like, what is my problem? It made me start thinking about the kind of place I come from—where your lawn is mowed all the time and there are all these architectural guidelines. I didn’t realize everything was visually organized, so I started examining the way facades represent what’s inside them, different buildings on campus, the way things were organized. My final project was a variety of prints and paintings that addressed landscapes in an abstracted way and how one represents beauty and decay.

When I went to graduate school, I started doing a lot of work on metaphors for utopias and how there’s a direct conflict between human nature and utopic realities of—

You think there are utopic realities?

There are good tries. The realities are short-lived because human nature doesn’t allow for that. We’re not meant to live in one sort of situation for a long time. Humans are builders, and we don’t build things that have a lot of forethought and that will last over time and adapt.

New work at the artist's studio. (Image: Carissa Pelleteri)

You’re talking about futility and the ways that planning doesn’t happen. How does that relate to what you’ve got up in the studio—the bird’s eye view of cities and the space around them that they show?

These are really new works. I just did them in the last couple of months. I went in my practice from documenting and examining utopias in different ways from where I grew up, and then moved from the personal to the public, to the global from the personal. A real stopping point that led to the work I’m doing now is that I started traveling to Berlin after 9/11.

New York is quite a labyrinth. Something’s always changing. When I went to Berlin, there was history and political history in almost every building. I started realizing that America’s so young and what architecture can contain, not just personal stories or a function, but geo/socio/political issues, an era you’re reminded of every day you walk by it. That really struck me, so I started examining buildings internationally that affect the way we live and how navigate or build around, what we tear down.

When we invaded Iraq, I decided I needed to go home for a little bit because I wasn’t sure what would happen, so I started listening to the radio and making drawings from housing projects that I did in Baghdad.

You traveled to Baghdad?

I have a friend who did, who’s a photojournalist. He let me go through all his photos, and I started thinking about reconstruction [in Iraq]. I was, like, you can’t reconstruct where there’s nothing there. So I started doing drawings to let me fantasize about what I wasn’t seeing, like how to depict borders and movement, men in action, people traveling or gunfights or whatever. It’s hard because I have no real cultural connection to these places. It’s sort of a weird thing to be saying.

No, it’s not. I think it’s healthy to consider what could be. People spend a lot of time looking at what is and making comments on that, which is fine, but I think imagination is good. Still, do you think it’d be useful for you to travel to these places?

I travel a lot. I’ve been to a lot of different places, and I like traveling. My husband is French-Swiss, and we spend a fair amount of time in Europe. The borders in France, Switzerland, and Germany—there’s never anyone there. There’s a couple of big border posts but then they have these little boxes on a dirt road practically, and no one’s ever there. In fact, when we went into Switzerland from Germany, there was no one there to stamp our passport. When I went to Tel Aviv for a show a month later, they were like, “How did you get from x to wherever?” And I was, like, “There was nobody home!”

How does that affect your sense of boundaries and borders? In Europe, the idea of borders and boundaries is not an actual idea, but an actual experience, as you just described.

It’s a lot more vague in the States than in Europe, where people say, “You cannot come here.” That just blows my mind. How can you own a piece of the earth? Man creates legacy and populations to inhabit that space—that patch of dirt—to claim it forever. I can’t say I like or dislike it, but I think it’s fascinating.

Why does the idea of abandoned legacy speak to you?

I think it’s kind of amazing that people keep trying. Our memories are very short, especially in the States, whereas in other cities, they have buildings that are, like, still riddled by bullets, like in Berlin. You can’t forget, though you’re growing up and have no real connection to it. But what I’ve observed going over there the last couple of years is that, as the years pass, it’s like a folk story to kids, especially with the internet. There’s nothing that deals with borders and physical boundaries. It’s very hard for people to hold onto histories that other people hold onto. We build for our actual lifespan and then things change, whether it’s from the outside or the inside. Nature—tornados, hurricanes—will change a place, or there’s a manmade force that wreaks destruction. There are housing projects that have been started, and then people have to leave because of some political treaty—because some people in a room said you have to leave. There are these huge structures littered all over the world in different places and different countries for different reasons. They’re just sitting there. It’s like monuments to failure or a missed future.

ARTIST WEBSITE:
caitlinmasley.com

© Therese+Joel, "Adrian & Lyoka"

The first exhibition to be presented at the gallery’s new space in Chelsea. On view from March 4 through Spring 2011, the exhibition explores sexual attraction and physical beauty as it relates to modern everyday existence across the globe through the work of twelve acclaimed photographers, collectives and duos.

CASS BIRD / BRIAN FINKE / CAMILLE VIVIER / CAROLL TAVERAS / CHRISTIAN WEBER / ELLEN JONG / JOSEPH SZABO/LØBER NØGEN / SANDY KIM / STEPHEN IRWIN / THERESE + JOEL / YISOOK SOHN / ZED NELSON

F.L.O.A.T Gallery, 300 west 22nd street, NYC

This month, I had the opportunity to have a studio visit with legendary photographer Martha Cooper.  We sat and “talked shop” about photography and New York City, thirty years back and now. I always knew of Martha Cooper, but there were things about her photographic career I only learned of that day. The 1980’s movie Beat Street – little did I know that she was the still photographer.  Perhaps she is best known for her extensive coverage of the early Hip Hop days, as it emerged from the Bronx. These images have been published worldwide, helping make Hip Hop the predominant international youth movement it is today. Looking at her collection of images and many published books,  (Street Play, Subway Art and New York State of Mind – to only name a few) it is evident that Martha had the desire to document NYC simply as it was, making images which hold views of complete authenticity which add to historic preservation.

Martha’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide and published in numerous magazines from National Geographic to Vibe. She lives in Manhattan where she is the Director of Photography at City Lore, the New York Center for Urban Folk Culture. For the past five years Martha has been shooting a personal project in SoWeBo, a neighborhood in Southwest Baltimore.

Carissa Pelleteri: When you moved to New York in 1975 what neighborhood did you live in and why did you choose to spend a lot of your time documenting in the Lower East Side?

Martha Cooper: In 1975 I was married to an anthropologist and living in Rhode Island where he was teaching at URI. I was the staff photographer for two weekly RI newspapers but wanted to come to NY because that’s where all the editorial work was at the time. I didn’t know anything about the city but answered an ad in the Village Voice to share an apartment for 3 days a week. It happened to be on the Upper Westside. So I began commuting back and forth. Eventually I got my own apartment and a staff job with the New York Post. I continued to commute back and forth for 5 years until my (now-ex) husband managed to get a teaching job at Fordham and move to NYC. The Post was on the Lower East Side so I often drove through Alphabet City at the end of the day looking for photos to use up the remaining film in my cameras before going back to develop the rolls at the end of the day.

CP: While making the images that wound up becoming “Street Play” were you pretty much the only photographer (and woman) on the street with a camera? Many of the children, if not aware, seem to trust you taking these pictures. What was your approach?

MC: At the time that part of the Lower East Side looked like a war zone with whole blocks of abandoned buildings and vacant lots. It was known as an area of crime and drugs and people were afraid to go there at all much less with a camera. My approach was simply to drive around until I saw something I wanted to shoot and then get out and shoot. If you hang in long enough people usually ignore you and go back to what they’re doing. If things looked dicey, I could always hop back into my car. I’m doing the same thing today in Baltimore – but on foot.

CP: Tell me about the fateful meeting with Edwin (HE -3).

MC: One day one of the kids whom I’d previously photographed with his pigeon coop showed me a little notebook of drawings and asked me why I didn’t take photos of graffiti. He explained that he was practicing variations of his nickname, HE3, to paint on a wall. Until that point I hadn’t understood that kids were writing their names. The idea that kids were designing graffiti in notebooks fascinated me. HE3 offered to introduce me to Dondi–and the rest, as they say, is history…

CP: At the time, did you have any idea that the images you were making would have a dramatic impact on graffiti, the artists, hip-hop and its now worldwide phenomenon?

MC: Actually I thought the exact opposite. I thought I was photographing something that could only happen in New York City and that it would disappear quickly.  I wanted to make a record of it in the spirit of historic preservation.

CP: When did you step away from the graffiti/hip-hop scene and for those 20 or so years, what were you working on?

MC: After Subway Art was published and Hip Hop became mainstream, I was no longer intent on photographing it as plenty of other photographers had jumped in. Also I’d left the Post so needed to get paying work to support myself. I’d always wanted to work for National Geographic so set my sights on that. For a while I was traveling a lot doing freelance assignments for them in exotic places like Ellesmere Island in the high arctic. I was also shooting some mundane corporate PR assignments to pay the bills.

CP: What do you think about a street photographers role in NYC now, compared to 30 years ago?

MC: Today, at least in NYC, everyone has a camera and is a street photographer. On the one hand it’s fascinating to look, via sites like Flickr, at what people are seeing on the street but on the other, there’s an incredible glut of photos.

CP: Your recent ongoing project in Baltimore has a similar feeling to the images made in the late 1970’s/80’s.  Why are you documenting in Baltimore?

MC: I wanted to get back to the kind of photography I felt I was best at–candid shots of people doing things on the street. I needed to pick a place where there was a lot of street life. Baltimore is my hometown, so I decided to try to document a neighborhood there. I wanted to be able to go back repeatedly and shoot as it changed over time and to be able to interact with the people I was photographing. Over the past five years I’ve made about 125 trips to Baltimore on the bus.

CP: Any images, projects or persons that are especially close to your heart?

MC: My 21 year old cat, Pancho.

CP: Tell me about your next exhibition / project / book.

MC: I always have a lot of irons in the fire. I’m working on a book with my 1970 Japanese tattoo photos with a Swedish Publisher, Dokument. Also I’m preparing for two shows in LA in April. One is the Art in the Streets show at MOCA and the other is at the Carmichael Gallery. That one is called Martha Cooper Remix. I’ve asked graffiti and street artists to choose one of my photos and reinterpret in their own style. I’m also going to have a show at Viva House, a soup kitchen in SoWeBo, my Baltimore neighborhood.  I wanted the people in my photos to be able to see what I’ve been up to.

Artists link: 12ozprophet.com/index.php/martha_cooper

Over the course of seven years, photographer Timothy Briner created “Boonville”, taking place in six different towns spread across the U.S. from New York to California. During this unique solitary road trip, his itinerary consisted of New York, North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, and California. Importantly, Briner did his best not to be an anonymous traveler just passing through, he chose to ground himself within the communities for weeks and months at a time. He became familiar and close with the locals and was fortunate to get to know the rhythms of their everyday lives. Within the portraits of hunters and smoke stacks, Briner has a clear opinion, which is never condescending or reductive. These images of different zip codes all with the name Boonville form a unique series of the commonalities of small towns in contemporary America, as seen from the inside. Currently, he has a solo show of the work at the Brauer Museum of Art in Valparaiso, Indiana and a trade edition of the book is in progress.

Briner was born in Indiana. He currently lives in Brooklyn, and is represented by Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York.

Carissa Pelleteri: What originally spawned Boonville? Which Boonville city did you first visit?

Timothy Briner: In 2003 I vacationed near the Adirondacks Mountains in the Village of Boonville, New York. My girlfriend at the time had access to a cabin there.  After spending a few weeks in Boonville, NY, I fell in love with the landscape and the people. It’s a fairly reserved and quite community, but I felt there was something mysterious happening just beyond the surface, something I was not going to be able to access in just a few days or weeks. I went back a year later for another visit and I quickly became obsessed with the town.

After four years of conceptualizing and developing the project, I finally arrived in Boonville in 2007. This time it was Boonville, Missouri. I spent a month in MO and went on to Boonville, North Carolina; Boonville, New York; Boonville, Indiana, and I returned to Boonville, Missouri for a few weeks before arriving in Boonville, Texas. I ended my travels in Boonville, California, in 2008. The amount of time I stayed in each town varied between 30-90 days.

CP: Are you in regular contact with anyone that you photographed?

TB: I’m in contact with many of the people I photographed, as well as people I lived with along the way, some more than others.

CP: Tell me about the boy with the dairy cows. I understand he passed away after you took his portrait.

TB: Kody.  I lived with Kody and his family for about a month while I was in Boonville, New York. My time with them was the most memorable of my entire trip. Kody passed away six months after I left NY due to a dirt-bike accident. The first edition of the book I made for the project was dedicated to Kody.

CP: What town was the WWIII image photographed? Any story behind this?

TB: WWIII was taken in Boonville, Missouri. I was on a walk one day and noticed it behind a bread factory in town. I went back that night and took the picture. I’ve made up a number of stories in my head regarding this image, but I have no hard evidence regarding who wrote it or why.

CP: Throughout this series, I see this remarkably similar feeling amongst all the people and places.  Did you choose to create this feeling or was this a commonality presented in each town?

TB: The common thread between each town is an important part of the project. I had a list of certain types of people and places I was looking for, but I explored many aspects of each town. The continuity really came together in the final edit.

CP: Since your solo show at Daniel Cooney, which was a success, are there other plans for Boonville?

TB: I currently have a solo show of the work at the Brauer Museum of Art in Valparaiso, Indiana. I’m also working on a trade edition of the book.

CP: What are you working on now?

TB: Since having my first child in July, I’ve been spending a lot of time working from home. Many things are still just notes and drawings in my journal. But I have a few projects nearing the finish line.

CP: How did Boonville impact you and does it have any influence in your current projects?

TB: During the year traveling and shooting Boonville, I came to understand my art and myself in a new way. Although some of the projects I’m currently working on look and feel different then Boonville, I can connect them directly to what I learned while making that work.

Artist website: timothybriner.com

Photos by Carissa Pelleteri for Artcards Review

The tone at Basel on Friday was solidly optimistic. The mega galleries were out in force. Hauser and Wirth had a breathtaking late work by Louise Borgouise and drawing and sculpture from art star Paul McCarthy that were of particular note. Gagosian gallery had a similar spread, showing works by star studded gallery favorites Serra, Koons, Hirst and Warhol. White Cube was showing the YBAs in all their glory, but even here the tone seemed markedly less conspicuous than usual. A new, sparkling cubic zirconium filled gold vatrine by the king of bling, Damien Hirst, seemed awkwardly out of place.

Gagosian

Paul McCarthy at Hauser and Wirth

Damien Hirst at White Cube

Murakami

Georg Baselitz

Galleries who experimented with razzle dazzle spectacle seemed contented to tout their painterly roots. Works from George Baselitz were ubiquitous. Werner gallery had a particularly striking, mural sized painting from this year. Positioned near the entrance of the fair, it seemed to foreshadow the work to come and to serve as a reminder that Pulse and NADA aren’t the only places to see vital new art. Mitchell Innes and Nash’s booth felt a bit like a museum. Their two man show dedicated to Kenneth Noland and Anthony Caro seems to illustrate a trend this year. Galleries seem to be digging deep into their stables. With results like this, one can hardly complain.

Kenneth Noland and Anthony Caro at Mitchell Innes and Nash

Eddie Martinez

After a long day of traipsing through art madness Art Positions offers a welcome and decidedly less noisy respite for the weary fair visitor. Art Positions is a special initiative that offers galleries the opportunity to present individual projects by single artists. Grouped together in the top left of the convention center the feel was significantly younger. A collaboration between Zieher smith and stable artist Eddie Martinez was particularly wonderful. The artist painted a massive, expressive triptych conceived specifically for this project. The painting is powerful and painterly without losing a sense of relevance. With an obvious debt to Basquiat and German expressionism, Martinez depicts a raucous banquet, filed with detritus and frequented by characters which seem to pop up throughout his oeuvre.

Chris Martin

This little gem by Chris Martin was one of many examples of work by young contemporary painters exhibiting at Basel.

Jenny Holzer

Joseph Kosuth

Barbara Kruger

Stellar art from the 70s and 80s abounded. There were unusual works by a slew of artists. Especially interesting was a neon light work by institutional critique artist Joseph Kosuth. Equally amazing was a chess set from Barbara Kruger, executed in her signature red and black subversive style.

Sudarshan Shetty

Gallery SKE from Bangalore was one of several galleries that made the trek from the other side of the world.  Indian artist Sudarshan Shetty’s intricate teak cage dominated the space. I was thoroughly impressed and equally happy to see something outside of the European and American norm.

awesome

More photos on Carissa Pelleteri’s flickr.

Photos by Carissa Pelleteri for Artcards Review

For day 2 of Miami art week we decided to branch out away from the main fair. There are a plethora of pop up fairs surrounding the main event. It is easy to get lost in orbit, with so much to do and so much to see. Nada, Scope, Pulse and Fountain all offer looks at younger, contemporary art from local, national and international artists. As the day wore on we were happy to see many of our gallerists and artists.

Cecilia Jurado and Brad Kahlhamer, Y Gallery at Nada Fair.

Jen Bekman

Steve Sacks, Bitforms Gallery

Aurel Schmidt, OHWOW Gallery

Tim Barber, OHWOW Gallery

Scott Campbell, OHWOW Gallery

Julian Montague, Pulse Fair

Jakkai Siributr

Howard Hurst and friend

Scope Art Fair

Denis McNett, Scope Art Fair

Olek, Scope Art Fair

Fountain Art Fair

Sisters Adina & Arielle Bier at Fountain

Amani Olu, Humble Arts Foundation at Nada

Okay Mountain Collective, Pulse Art Fair

Michael Buhler-Rose signing limited edition Grolsch beer

More photos on Carissa Pelleteri’s flickr.

"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

"Kon Would Rather Eat A Palm Frond On Slater's Birthday Than Drink Muddy Water"

Pablo Power merges text, photography and painting to echo the ephemeral life of the unseen. Passionate about documenting not only the lives but also the lifestyles found just outside city limits, Power submerses himself in grimy subculture and finds that it isn’t so bad. Rather than criticizing his surroundings, Power focuses on capturing moments and regenerating their energy. As a teenager in Miami he experimented with a myriad of disparate offerings to the street. Exploring a range between public subversion and permanent collaborative commissions for Miami Dade Transåit, Power eventually settled on what would be his focus and obsession for years to come: spontaneous bombardment of all accessible space, stationary or mobile, with his “visual mantra.”

"Gang Signs And Other Enigmatic Puffmutterings"

Power began taking photographs of friends such as the “Inkheads” crew, and quickly began incorporating these photographs into studio work, experimenting with texture and medium. Thick acrylic paint strokes are juxtaposed with finely-printed marker lines which become incidental to the photograph. Each facet of the picture melds into the surface, collapsing upon one another to form an interwoven image. Finally applying the last layer to his works, Power attaches found objects, a physical, literal record of his travels. His current work is a culmination of his extensive photographic efforts and bears similarities to his work as a young street artist. Today, Power’s message is as raw and powerful as ever. Pablo’s work was recently exhibited in Re:Form School produced by The Hole Gallery and will be showing with 800lb. Artists at Splashlight Studios from November 1st to December 31st.

"Half A Face Brings Alex Full Circle"

Carissa Pelleteri: What did you begin first? Photographing or Painting?

Pablo Power: I started out with painting. Originally, in the street, but as time went on I began painting on canvas in a style that was influenced by the work in the street, but was more of an experimentation with color and texture. My first photography came later, and in the beginning was strictly a way to document the work in the street. Over time I start noticing that a lot of what I had first considered background in those photos was actually much more interesting than what I had painted on the walls and became the subject of the photos. I was also very fortunate to have spent those years around a very colorful group of friends, who were all very entertaining to document.

CP: How did your process of combining painting and photography come about?

PP: Mostly as a way to objectify the imagery that I was seeing in my head and provide myself the ability to reach out and touch things I was imagining. Over time I’ve experimented with a lot of different media and never been totally satisfied with the direction any one of them were heading, so I finally started wondering what they all would look like together.

"South Carolina Sex Offenders And San Franciscan Toilet Paper Vesture"

"Goodbye Goldsmith/Hello Goodthings/You Helped Me While You Hurt Me"

CP: Why do you think you are drawn and intrigued by the grimy subculture of your subjects?

PP: The subject matter of my work is really just concomitant to me not only being drawn to, but from a grimy subculture. The photographs and other work came after the fact of me already being in the margins of civilization, then bringing a camera out there. Later on, I did dream up some projects that had more concept and ambition behind them, the time I spent in Reno for instance, but even that stuff was really just pictures of places I’d be if left to my own devices.

CP: To become fully immersed in the scene you were making these photos of, did you change your appearance or lifestyle to blend in and relate to them?

PP: Not really. I did a series of photos in Miami with some pretty tough characters at a time when I would usually wear T shirts with cartoon bunny rabbits and was giving myself the stupidest haircuts in the world. On the other hand, I more recently did a similar project in Reno, but wasn’t shaving, bathing, or changing my clothes for weeks at a time. It did help me to blend in with the paranoid vagrom that I was photographing, but I actually would have done it out of laziness anyway.

"I was born screaming and I'm still screaming" (detail)

"I was born screaming and I'm still screaming" (detail)

CP: Has anything crazy or life threatening happened to you during any of your photo making adventures?

PP: I can’t say that I’ve ever really felt that my life was threatened, but have definitely had many crazy experiences. Best of all though, I’ve had the opportunity to meet some very nice folks who have been kind enough to show around a stratum of society that few people outside of it get to see.

"I Am A Highwayman. Along East Fifth Street I Did Ride"

CP: Is there anything you wish you did differently during the making of this series?

PP: I guess that’s an impetus behind continuing to experiment with these pieces and seeing how they evolve. Each time I finish one I see something that I’d like to do differently and try to make it happen in the next piece.

artist website:
pablopower.org