Pipe Dreams marks not only Sheryo and the Yok’s first exhibition together in the United States, but also a departure from what viewers have come to expect from the duo. As of late, the artists have been defined by their use of a red, black, and white palette to portray unique vision of reality. However, don’t be concerned that these changes mean that the work is missing the cartoonish, pop imagery seen in past pieces. The pizza, drugs, and other wild things are still present, just reimagined.

During their travels to through South East Asia, from Sheryo’s native Singapore to Vietnam, the artists began to infuse their work with the surrounding culture. Now, geishas and dragons have become central characters alongside smoking pizzas and skateboards. While visiting Vietnam, the artists took advantage of the opportunity to begin painting pottery, starting with vases and later expanding in the States to plates. Initially, the work appears a light air blue, mimicking the smoke emanating from elongated cigarette holders. After three coats, the plates begin to don the cobalt blue associated with Eastern ceramics.

Beyond these surface appearances, this influence extends to deeper meanings, including numerology. During the studio visit, patterns of 4 (4, 8, 12) began to emerge within the bodies of work, however intentional or not. Sheryo was quick to speak about the auspicious meanings of the numbers 4 and 8 in Chinese, representing wealth and death respectively. Other coded beliefs trace their way through the different media in the exhibition, including the Illuminati. The all-seeing-eye positioned atop a pyramid has become a widely recognized symbol for the alleged secret society. Through these allegorical codes, an air of mysticism is hidden within their playful cartoons. Read the rest of this article »

Brooklyn-based Dega Films launched a Kickstarter last week to fund their upcoming series of street art films, Wild In The Streets. To me, the series looks like Dega Films is trying to make street art videos in the style of skate videos. It’s a really cool idea. I’m not sure if it will work, but it’s definitely worth a shot. Obviously graffiti writers have been making bombing videos for decades that work on that same principle, but those were always circulated among other writers and not really made for the general public.

Here are two of Dega Films most recent videos:

ART POLLUTION: The Yok & Sheryo – 5Pointz – Queens, NY from DEGA films on Vimeo.

Wild In The Streets: Jilly Ballistic from DEGA films on Vimeo.

Sheryo and The Yok painted the above piece in New York’s Little Italy earlier this week as part of the Little Italy Street Art Project that Wayne Rada and I have been organizing there.

The piece comes just a few weeks before the duo have a show walking distance away at Krause Gallery. That show, Pipe Dreams, opens May 16th from 7-9pm and runs through June 16th. The show center’s on the couple’s recent travels in Asia and includes ceramic work from them in line with what you might have seen at Krause Gallery’s booth at Scope NY earlier this year. Should be a fun one.

Photo by Wayne Rada

Note: This article is the third in a three part series that discusses how three artists dealt with the topic of histories within their Bushwick Collective murals. Check out part 1 here and part 2 here.

Recently, the Yok and Sheryo shared their “Pipe Dreams” with 5 Pointz in Long Island City. This past week, the duo chose to show the Bushwick Collective their present rather their future. Emblazoned with the locals of Bushwick, such as roaches, rats, pizza, and the devil, their composition contains memories of their travels as well as these traces of home. Titled “Road Trip,” skeletons can be seen surfing, which the Yok took in while in Australia, alongside various characters painting and drinking. Together, each of these cartoons rides an extended motorcycle, joining memories of home and far off excursions.

The complex narratives in their collaborative walls often contain coded jokes as well as the dominant narrative; Ping Pong nicknames references to cartoons find their way into the descriptive elements of each figure. Most endearing of any character Sheryo has created was one that surfaced recently in the crew of cyclists. An alien with other worldly features and was placed between a bearded man and a surfing skeleton in the central part of the piece. The artist said that it represented herself as an illegal alien, going so far as to create a unicorn on the being to match her own clothing that day. This self-portrait sees the artist riding alongside representations of her travels and local friends, enjoying the ride.

Photos by Rhiannon Platt

The Yok and Sheryo are the latest artists to paint in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago courtesy of Pawn Works with support from Alderman Danny Solis, The Chicago Urban Art Society and the Pilsen neighborhood. Their trip also included a tour of Chicago’s many hotdog spots, although I’m guessing they missed my favorite spot since it’s out in the suburbs.

Photos courtesy of Pawn Works

The Yok and Creepy

For two years the wall shown above remained a fixture at 5 Pointz in Long Island City. Few artists see that amount of exposure on the building’s rotating facades. At the time that they were visiting, few walls were adorned with their signature characters, and even fewer pieces could be seen at this scale in New York. The combination of Creepy’s cute winged man combined with the Yok’s pensive owl made for a moving aesthetic combination that moved viewers to visit the work multiple times during its life.

Sheryo

The Yok

Since this piece came into realization, we have seen the Yok and Sheryo become regular painting partners as well as (semi)regular residents of New York City. It seemed only fitting that the long running Creepy and the Yok wall should come to an end in order to usher in Spring and with it the Yok and Sheryo’s return to New York.

Sheryo

The Yok

A constant fixture of last year’s warm weather, the return of the Yok and Sheryo signals the shape of things to come: warmer days, and of course more walls. That being said, a downpour postponed finishing the last fourth of the wall for a later day. It seems that the warm weather is just a “Pipe Dream,” like their wall. But it’s technically spring, right?

The Yok and Sheryo. Photo courtesy of The Yok.

Photos by Rhiannon Platt and courtesy of The Yok

Sheryo and The Yok in Scarborough, Western Australia

The Yok and Sheryo have finally returned to NYC after a good few months traveling and painting around the world. We posted a few pieces from this trip back in November, but that wasn’t the whole trip. Here are a few more of my favorites (I think they’ll all located in Australia), plus a video of the above wall being painted.

The Yok in Fitzroy, Australia

Sheryo in Perth, Australia

Sheryo

The Yok and Sheryo in Perth, Australia

The Yok

SCARBOROUGH video from theyok on Vimeo.

Photos courtesy of The Yok

Chicago’s Galerie F has a group show opening tomorrow and it looks really fun. Don’t Sweat It is curated by Luke Pelletier and features work by The Yok, Sheryo, and many more artists.

As you can see from the video teaser below, the premise show is pretty straightforward: It features artists to draw cool stuff well.

Sheryo and The Yok in Wollongong, Australia

Sheryo and The Yok have spent the last few months traveling, and as a result they’ve painted in a lot of different cities over the last few months. Here are some of my favorite recent-ish walls from them in the USA, Vietnam, and Australia.

Sheryo and The Yok in Sydney, Australia

The Yok and Sheryo in Perth, Australia

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Monica Ellis

Last month, I was at the Living Walls Conference in Atlanta, but it’s only now that I’ve really had a chance to sit down and write about it. I thought that I was going to write this really long post, but the environment at Living Walls is difficult to capture in words, so this post isn’t nearly as long as I would have hoped.

Miso. Click to view large.

Living Walls is, as far as I can tell, the best mural conference/festival/program going on right now in North America. Living Walls doesn’t tend to just invite all the artists who are painting at other mural events around the world. They invite good artists. Sometimes those artists are guys like Roa who are everywhere, and sometimes it’s women like Miso who have only ever painted one or two murals. As a result, Living Walls sets trends among mural festivals.

Lex and Sten

For their main conference this year, Living Walls really bucked popular trends and tried to put street art on a new track by having a festival made up almost entirely of female muralists. While guys like Gaia, LNY and I were still invited to speak at the lecture and panel portion of the conference, the murals by Lex&Sten and Indigo&Andrzej Urbanski were the only two where male artists were contributing.

Martina Merlini

While the murals weren’t as amazing on the whole as they were last year and the crowd of artists wasn’t nearly as rowdy (although that might have been a plus), this year’s Living Walls did bring some great work to Atlanta and really showed that there are some underrated female street artists and muralists out there who could be on the mural circuit as much as guys like Jaz or Roa. My hope and expecting is that the top-tier of artists from the conference will get more attention brought to their work thanks to Living Walls and some will start getting invited to a lot more mural festivals. As I’ve said in the past, I do not generally get excited to give artists preferential treatment based on them belonging to some underrepresented group, but I can see why an all-female Living Walls may have been the right move for this year even if the quality of the work did drop slightly.

Jessie and Katey

This Living Walls conference had more artists than ever before who were either more on the community mural side of the spectrum or had never painted a mural before. The results of that move were mixed, but there were some artists like Jessie&Katey and Monica Ellis who took the opportunity and absolutely crushed it.

Hyuro. This wall has since been painted over.

One thing I have to add isn’t so much about the art though. Whether Living Walls were inviting only artists that none of us have ever heard of before or stealing their line-up from Nuart, it would still be at least one of the best mural conferences in the world. That’s because Living Walls’ secret is in their amazing staff. Living Walls has best team of volunteers of any mural festival I’ve ever seen or could imagine. They are unbelievably dedicated to the festival and to getting more world-class street art and murals in Atlanta. Every day, the media team led by Alex Parrish was up until something like 4am putting together a video of what had gone on that day, and then they’d be back up at 7am to start filming all over again. Just last week, I was emailing with Keif Schleifer, their Logistics Director, who was spending her free time advising me on cherry-pickers. The day of the Vandalog Movie Night, volunteers showed up out of the blue to help us set up and run the show. Laura Calle and pretty much everyone else on staff who spent their own money to pay for the gas to drive myself and the artists around Atlanta. The drag queen who was a volunteer last year and this year helped arrange a drag show for the Living Walls Block Party. The artist assistants who stand in the hot sun alongside their artists all day long, offering any help they can. And of course, Monica Campana, the Executive Director of Living Walls, who is the amazing glue holding everything together without ever sleeping or slowing down. Everyone on staff or volunteering at Living Walls works at least as hard as the artists, and they were certainly working harder than me. After visiting two years in a row for just a few days each time, it honestly feels like I have family in Atlanta.

Olive47

Much more after the jump… Read the rest of this article »