That guy that paints letters has an upcoming show in LA called Innocence, at CGH Circa (a new art venue from the people at Corey Helford Gallery at 8530-A Washington Boulevard in Culver City). The show opens on June 15th at 7pm and will run until July 13th. The show will feature letters painted in such a way that calls attention to the relationship between art and vandalism, and that’s why the show is called Innocence.
Photos courtesy of Corey Helford Gallery
Toronto is a vibrant, culturally diverse, and immensely creative city, with a strong arts community. Graffiti culture started growing in the 80’s, with the most notable artist being Ren, who is still considered a pioneer in our city and beyond. Since then, Graffiti has been a visible and established part of Toronto. For as long as I can remember, Rush Lane aka Graff Alley has always been comprised of blocks of walls coated in paint, full of new and exciting pieces to find.
Continue reading “An introduction to Toronto’s street art and graffiti”
This event sounds amazing. Between the hype in New York, London, Los Angeles and Paris, Vienna has enthusiastically been trying to put itself on the map in the global street art scene. The history of the city is one that has shown support of international street art for years but all that suddenly seems fairly small-scale in comparison to this festival. Cash, Cans & Candy has invited some of the big names of street artists (Shepard Fairey, Faile, Retna, Roa, Robbie Conal, Jaz, Dan Witz, etc) as well as some newer or lesser known talent to paint 800 meters (a half mile) of wall space around Vienna.
Shepard finished his wall at the end of May. Kicking the festival off with Shepard was probably a smart move in setting the tone for the rest of the events. The space he was given to work with definitely suited his style and the image is beautiful but I don’t think he incorporated the existing architecture as much as he could have. You can catch Faile painting their wall on June 20th.
The gallery exhibition of the same name at Galerie Hilger Next looks worth seeing. They’ve posted photos of a number of the exhibited works here.
The festival closes September 13th. To keep up with the ongoing events, including talks, tours, workshops, performances and block parties, check out the Cash, Cans & Candy Facebook page.
Photos courtesy of Cash, Cans & Candy
Pure Evil is one of the familiar faces of the British street art scene both for his own art and for The Pure Evil Gallery that he runs in Shoreditch. Tim Hans met with Pure Evil at his gallery/studio for the latest in our continuing series of photo-portraits of artists by Tim, and Caroline asked Pure Evil about art and his gallery.
Caroline: Do you think it’s important for artists to have a sort of trademark or logo?
Pure Evil: No, I think artists who stick to the same recognizable thing and just do it again and again are being boring. This is ironic because I repeatedly draw bunnies everywhere. I don’t see that as a logo, it’s a tag. I was watching a film about David Bowie the other night and I got this from it which is very good advice. HOW TO BE A GREAT ARTIST – Change the diversity of what you do at a mind boggling rate. Be prodigious and act as a lightning rod for your time. Bowie did it, I want to achieve something similar, just by doing a whole bunch of crazy different stuff.
CC: What inspires you to create? Where do your ideas come from?
PE: They kind of bombard me from everywhere.. its that whole ‘being a lightning rod’ idea…There’s a flash and then it’s embedded in my cranium. It might be a sentence in a book I’m reading. It might be an image on Tumblr. It might be something I misheard but decided the new form of the phrase is interesting. It might be from a dream. It might be something that I saw and then promptly forgot and then later on thought of it as an original idea.
I just did a check through my history to see what I have been looking at in the past week :
CC: What was it like being raised by a father who is an artist?
PE: He only took me to the cinema once, to see “LIVE AND LET DIE” which was awesome to watch as a kid, but boy he took me to a lot of art museums and we saw a lot of celtic standing stones all over Europe. It was great being surrounded by Picasso’s and Pop Art when I was growing up. I loved seeing how he never stopped painting EVER. It’s really inspiring… he’s probably painting right now.
CC: What was starting your own gallery like?
PE: It was totally inspired by Aaron Rose’s Alleged Gallery. That was the blueprint, that and Santa’s Ghetto… Just get a space, paint the walls white and hey presto! You have a gallery. I didn’t even think of keeping it going for more than 2 weeks, but it just seemed like fun. Finding a whole basement that could be used to make art and music was a bonus, and the area is smack bang in the middle of street art central which is pretty cool. I call myself the accidental gallerist though, working out how to actually run it and make it work in the long run was a bit of work, but I just looked at Leo Castelli and what an amazing job he did with Pop Art in the 60’s… he’s a bit of a guru. Read Leo and His Circle. It’s an eye opening book.
CC: Your creativity is pretty multifaceted. Could you talk about the different mediums you use in your artwork? Or about the projects you’ve worked on besides visual arts?
PE: I like spray paint quite a bit. Right now I’m having a lot of fun doing freehand spray stuff and layering OCD tags on top of each other to make randomness. I also like using Krink which moves so beautifully. Then there’s neon which is bloody beautiful to look at and because it comes from signage it’s a perfect medium for street art, which is street signage. I’ve got a neon in a contemporary auction in Paris which is quite humbling because it’s in there with complete legends like Victor Vasarely and Kenneth Noland. Making a genre jump is pretty exciting. Being stuck in one box is tedious. My baby sits in a little brightly coloured doughnut for about half an hour and then she just gets bored and wants some boob. Street Art is the doughnut, Contemporary art is the boob.
I’m quite into making films, just short shonky stuff, and I’m looking into using 16mm just because it’s beautiful and analog. In the basement we have an amazing music studio. It kicks ass. Here’s the music stuff. I’ve got an album called A NEW DAWN coming out in July and another coming out soon after called THE NATIONAL ARCHIVE. All art movements have a soundtrack and were making ours in-house.
CC: Any upcoming projects we should look forward to?
PE: No. Fear them all. Actually I had a baby called Bunny recently and she is going to be something….
Photos by Tim Hans
Stinkfish and Buytre APC painted the above piece about two years ago in London. Originally, it looked like this. As you can see, it now looks mostly the same, except for the face Stinkfish painted. Was it the buff squad? No, that would be a strange buff. Was it that Stinkfish used a strange paint that faded much quicker than the rest of the piece? No. Did a vigilante come along and paint over the face because they didn’t like it? No. Well, sort of. Depending on your take on things.
Pochoir (aka Paul Stephenson) is behind the removal of Stinkfish’s work. In the gallery, Pochoir removes portions of old paintings that he buys at auction. Interesting stuff, right? Well how about on the street? For this piece, Pochoir painted acid onto the parts of the piece that he wanted to remove, and then used half a dozen different abrasive tools to get the paint off.
I recently met Pochoir and he explained to me how a lot of people look at his removal paintings and in their mind they can project an image of what has been removed back onto the painting. Makes sense. I look at this piece and I can imagine that there was a horse there once and what the horse looked like, even though I’d never actually seen the piece before Pochoir got to it. With the removal of Stinkfish’s portrait, I think the same effect is still possible. I can still imagine some sort of idealized version of Stinkfish’s work even though it’s gone.
So I really don’t know what to think of Pochoir’s work. In the gallery, I find it really interesting. It reactivates “dead” paintings. And street art is ephemeral, but should we embrace the intentional speeding up of that process? Or is that completely the wrong way to look at this since Pochoir’s erasure is also artwork too. I don’t know.
What do you think about Pochoir’s work?
Photos by Pochoir
Sorry for all the downtime on Vandalog this week. I dunno what’s up with Vandalog’s web host. If you have suggestions of a good web host that I could move to (even though I just switched to Gandi), let me know. Anyway, here’s what I’ve been reading:
Photo by RJ Rushmore
Last fall, Labrona did a mural in the center of the city, in collaboration with MU. He recently decided to finish the bottom of this mural, and invited his friends Gawd, Alex Produkt, and Beeforeo. They painted it freestyle, with out a sketch or plan, and this is the result.
Photos by Aline Mairet
Bast‘s latest solo show opens later this month at Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton, New York. I can’t wait to see what Bast has made for Seafoam. This is the first time in my memory that Bast has exhibited his sculptures (save for the Deluxx Fluxx Arcade where he collaborated with Faile). Of course, I could be completely forgetting something at the moment. Can you think of other sculptures by Bast? Regardless, the sculptures in Seafoam are made from detritus found at Coney Island.
Eric Firestone asked me to write something about Bast for this show, so here are my thoughts about the man… Bäst has spent over a decade stenciling, postering and tagging the streets of New York City, where he has proven himself a master of a gritty urban aesthetic and a representative of the resilient spirit of the city’s underdogs. Through the complex physical layering of collage, figures, advertisements, and patterns, Bäst often represents contradictory conceptions of the city in a single artwork, hiding the rough-and-tumble reality of life within beauty, humor, and Disneyfication. Is Bäst an untrained obsessive-labeled-artist or a master observer and creator? The man behind the name hides in the shadows as one of the last great anonymous street artists. Bäst is a man who knows his city, but we may never really know him.
Seafoam opens June 15th (6-8pm) and runs through July 3rd.
Photo courtesy of Eric Firestone Gallery
While I was in London recently, I had the opportunity to tour the murals in Dulwich thanks to Remi/Rough. Dulwich is a part of South London, almost suburbia really, where you definitely wouldn’t expect to see world class murals, but a fair few have popped up recently. Most of the murals in Dulwich are thanks to the recent Baroque The Streets festival, where artists were invited to paint murals based on paintings in the Dulwich Picture Gallery. We already posted about Reka’s piece for the festival, so here are a few more pieces I found in this quite part of London. By far my favorite has to be the piece by Nunca, but there are a lot of strong pieces. Thanks again to Remi/Rough for showing me around town.
Continue reading “Baroque the Streets – A street art festival in South London”
D*face will be the last artist to exhibit at London’s StolenSpace Gallery in their current location, fitting since he owns the place. D*face’s New World Disorder show runs from June 7th through the 23rd and will take place both in StolenSpace and in D*face’s studio in The Old Truman Brewery, just above the gallery. Much of the work from the show is inspired by the tragic death of Pat Tillman and the cover-up surrounding his death.
Photo courtesy of StolenSpace Gallery
