Titifreak‘s one-night-only solo show at the new One Thirty 3 gallery in Newcastle, UK opened last week. Here are a few photos from the installation, and Wooster Collective has a video.
Photos by Dan Graham and David Bilbrough
Spending Time With Felix Morelo
When filmmaker Keith Haskel emailed me about his latest video, Spending Time With Felix Morelo, I thought “Oh this is going to be boring.” Keith has made some interesting videos in the past, but he described Felix as “the dude who makes a shit-ton of chalk faces all over Union Square, Williamsburg, etc.” Maybe it’s just a silly bias that I have, but the word “chalk” made me very wary. Seems so corny. But then I actually watched the damn video and it turns out that Felix Morelo is probably pretty awesome. So that’s my story of a bias against chalk art, and here’s the video that’s making me reexamine that bias:
Weekend link-o-rama
This week was exam week, so that means that the majority of my time was split equally between studying and procrastinating with my roommates on N64 and that this week’s link-o-rama is a bit longer than usual:
- Miss Van did a studio visit for Hi Fructose.
- Roa, Phelgm and Robots have an installation going on outside of London through March 6th.
- Yes for more street art in Zambia and volunteering!
- A perfect example of how street art can brighten up a community (unless there’s backlash for trying to make the site of a car crash look nice, like the backlash when artists painted the separation wall in Palestine).
- Another example.
- Michael De Feo has his first London solo show opening next week.
- MOMO put up a piece in London, but I think thedocumentation is more interesting than the end result.
- Reader has a new zine out. It is devoted to art on postal labels.
- And now even Mr. Brainwash’s street art is getting protected with plexiglass…
- Insurgency Inc is doing some hilarious stuff in LA. These posters relating to Banksy are some of my favorites.
- Also, I’ve been posting a lot of photos on my flickr lately of stickers in Philadelphia.
Photo by RJ Rushmore
Next week: Solo show and book from Elbow Toe
Next week is going to be a big one for Brian Adam Douglas, aka Elbow Toe and his UK fans. Due Dates, his solo show at the Warrington Museum in the UK, will be moving to Black Rat Projects. Due Date opens next Thursday evening, March 10th. If you already saw Due Date at the Warrington, it will still be worth checking it out again at Black Rat Press, as the show will include one very special collage that has not been seen before. Additionally, the relaunch of Due Date at BRP will double as the launch for his first book, Paper Cuts.
Photo courtesy of Elbow Toe
Some NY art fair suggestions
With two midterms exams tomorrow, I’m rushing this post, but here’s a simple list for some of what to check out at the art fairs in New York this week.
- The Armory Show:
– Honor Fraser (Kaws and Kenny Scharf)
– Ratio 3 (Barry McGee)
– Stuart Shave/Modern Art (Barry McGee) - Fountain:
– 140-foot long street art installation, although it sounds like this might be the same installation as was recently at Fountain in Miami, or at least partially the same. - Verge Art Brooklyn:
– Arch 402 (Cept aka Mike Ballard)
– English Kills Gallery (Don Pablo Pedro) - Scope:
– Contra Projects (D*face, How&Nosm, James Marshall aka Dalek, Ron English, Tristan Eaton, TrustoCorp and more) - Volta:
– Carmichael Gallery (Mark Jenkins)
– Wilde Gallery (EVOL) - Pulse:
– Joshua Liner Gallery (David Ellis)
– Ben Wolf’s installation (He has collaborated with Swoon and Maya Hayuk)
I won’t be in NYC for the fairs myself, but I’ll hopefully have some photos to post. Otherwise, the places I will be getting my art fair news will be Hyperallergic and Arrested Motion.
Photo courtesy of Volta Art Fair
Deja Vu from mobstr
DAL in Cape Town
This piece is by DAL, an artist from China who is currently working in Cape Town. Interesting stuff.
Photo by DAL
A video interview with Ludo
Ludo was recently interviewed for French tv. Here’s the video (which luckily has English subtitles for people like me who practically failed high school French):
El Celso headed to Pandemic Gallery
El Celso‘s solo show ¡No Habla Español! is opening at Brooklyn’s Pandemic Gallery on March 11th. The story behind this show is pretty interesting. I’m just posting the press release because that explains it pretty well:
¡NO HABLA ESPAÑOL! is El Celso’s most personal show to date. This new series of works was inspired by a recent trip to Peru where the artist became obsessed with posters made in the “chicha” style. These hand-made posters line city streets all over Peru and generally feature an eye-popping neon color palette and commercial graphics-inspired lettering. They are generally used to advertise working class concerts and other events. During a recent trip around Peru, in 2010, Celso began collecting discarded and out-of-date fragments of these posters – known as afiches chicha in Spanish – from the streets of towns such as Chachapoyas, Chiclayo, Cajamarca and Lima (to name a few).
Further inspired by their look, he established contact with the esteemed Fortunato Urcuhuaranga at Publicidad Viusa, the print workshop that originated this iconic DayGlo look back in the 1980s. (Urcuhuaranga is a former radio DJ and he originally created these posters to advertise his station’s musical happenings.) Based on the outskirts of Lima, in the suburb of San Juan, Ate, this renowned family-run studio has produced posters for countless local Peruvian acts, as well as visual artists and arts organizations around the world.
In collaboration with the Urcuhuarangas, Celso created a series of posters inspired by the Peruvian chicha style. However Celso’s posters are a wry play on the idea of the advertisement: event posters created for non-events. Since last year, he has installed dozens of these on the streets of New York and Miami.
The posters look pretty cool, and the whole concept reminds me of one of my favorite comments in the film Beautiful Losers. One of the artists, whose name I forget, says something like “I love old advertisements. The kind that can’t hurt you anymore because they’re selling typewriters.” I think that is part of the idea behind El Celso’s posters, but then the question has to be asked about to what degree is street art advertising? So while I love the idea behind these posters, it’s difficult to say that they are not selling anything. After all, the posters say El Celso’s name and I’ve become familiar with these posters as they have appeared on the street, so I already knew a bit about them before reading about the show and that probably made me more likely to post about them on Vandalog. Still, I like the posters and I’m not gonna call out El Celso too severely unless he makes a poster specific to this show and starts pasting it up around NYC. That’s when, for me, things shift occurs from art with a bit of advertising to advertising with a bit of art.
And yes, obviously graffiti is advertising names too, but writers aren’t claiming to not be advertising. On the other hand, El Celso does seem to be attempting non-advertising, the type of advertising that can’t “hurt you anymore.”
Here’s a flyer for the show:
Photo by C-Monster
JR: LA, NYTimes and TED
JR is continuing his work LA, as part of a push before both MOCA’s Art In The Streets show and the announcement of how JR plans to use his TED Prize. While the LA Weekly has been documenting JR’s murals, official images from JR are now showing up on his website.
The New York Times is even getting interested in JR with a large article on him published last week.
So far, it isn’t known exactly how JR plans to use his TED Prize money, but that will be announced on Wednesday evening with a live streaming event online.
Photo by JR