Author: RJ Rushmore

RJ Rushmore has been involved in contemporary art as a writer, curator, photographer, arts administrator, and fan since 2008. With a focus on street art, graffiti, and public art, RJ facilitates and promotes catalytic and ambitious art outdoors, in galleries, and online. He founded the street art blog Vandalog and has worked at The L.I.S.A. Project NYC, Mural Arts Philadelphia, and Creative Time. Currently, RJ is Co-Curator of Art in Ad Places.
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Lucy McLauchlan’s “Together”

As a typical 19-year-old guy, I tend to enjoy art which is “edgy” (aka: full of girls, guns and rebellion – I couldn’t think of a ‘g’ word for that). That’s certainly not always true, but I did prefer Chloe Early’s tank paintings to pretty much anything else she’s done, so I think it’s fair to say that it’s at least one aspect of what I find interesting in art. That said, sometimes I want to look at something calming, beautiful and, if you will, zen. Now, my favorite artist is Swoon, so if course, she fits into that beautiful category, but she’s not the only one. Lucy McLauchlan, when she gets it right, is one of the most underrated young painters in London.

Luckily, Lazarides Gallery agrees with me, because they have a solo show from Lucy starting next week at their Rathbone Place location in London. In fact, Together is her second solo show with Lazarides.

As usual, Lucy is painting on a huge variety of material for this show. Just read this section of the press release:

Paint cans, ex-Police riot shields, doorways, camper vans, plastic containers, driftwood, and brick walls have all been transformed by Lucy McLauchlan’s graphic, fluid monochromatic style. In our technologically dominate age forget digital manipulation, McLauchlan prefers to stick with Indian ink or permanent marker often allowing the mistakes to take centre stage in her fantastical murals.

Here’s the hoping that Lucy will be doing some paintings on the gallery walls as well. Her mural currently gracing the Rathbone Place stairwell is one of my favorite things about that space (along with David Choe’s mural in the same stairwell).

Together runs from July 1st through August 12th.

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Eltono collaborates with the public

Update: D’oh. Aaron posted about this months ago. I just got reminded of it in Eltono’s newsletter and thought “We didn’t post about that right? Why not? It’s cool.” Well, we did post about it. Sorry Aaron.

A few months ago, Eltono put together an experiment on the streets of Coruña, Spain. First, he painted geometric designs on sheets of plexiglass. Then he painted the entire other side of the glass white. He placed these sheets in three spots around town and waited. Here are the results:

Everyday passersby began to draw on the plexiglass or scratch away at the paint… Eventually Eltono’s designs on the other side of the glass began to show through.

After 5 days, Eltono removed the pieces and brought them back to a gallery for the MUAU:

You can see more about the project on Eltono’s website.

Photos courtesy of Eltono

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SHRED at Perry Rubenstein Gallery

Bears by Brian Adam Douglas

Perry Rubenstein Gallery in NYC has was looks like an awesome show opening on July 1st. SHRED is a show of collage-based artworks curated by Carlo McCormick, an editor at Paper magazine. Traditionally not a gallery focused on street art, Perry Rubenstein Gallery seems to have gotten interested in the genre after starting to work with Faile last year (and I think Faile have a show there in the fall). For SHRED, McCormick has brought together classic works from well-known masters of collage like Rauschenberg, Gee Vaucher and Dash Snow, as well as brand new work from the likes of Brian Adam Douglas (aka Elbowtoe), Faile (including brand new imagery), Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Judith Supine and others.

This should be great show, not just for the impressive artwork, but also because this will expose a whole new group of people to artists like Judith Supine and Brian Adam Douglas.

SHRED is runs from July 1st through August 27th, with an opening reception on July 1st from 6-8pm.

Via my love for you is a stampede of horses

Photo courtesy of Brian Adam Douglas

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Death Warmed Over

Chris RWK

Five staples of New York street art (Veng RWK, Chris RWK, Cake, Luna Park and Becki Fuller) have gotten together for their show Death Warmed Over, which opens Friday evening at Fresthetic in Brooklyn. Veng, Chris and Cake will be showing their paintings, while Luna Park and Becki Fuller will have prints of their photos. Naturally, the show’s theme is death. If you’re thinking of checking out this show, best to go down on Friday (7-10pm). Although Death Warmed Over will be on until July 20th, the opening events will include live painting and a DJ set by Royce Bannon. Check out The Street Spot for more info.

Photo by Chris RWK

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Swoon for sale (AGAIN) at Phillips de Pury

Looks like this piece by Swoon is finally going to hit the auction block at Phillips de Pury next week. Last March, the exact same artwork was pulled from an auction there less than 24 hours before it was due to be sold. For that first auction, PdP had estimated the artwork at just £2,000-3,000, a shockingly low number. This time though, the piece is being estimated at £10,000-15,000, which is pretty much what you would expect.

Photo courtesy of Phillips de Pury

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Barry McGee and Clare Rojas museum show

Barry McGee

Husband and wife artist duo Barry McGee and Clare Rojas opened a show together last week at the Bolinas Museum in California. McGee and Rojas installed the shows together, but they have separated them into two segments: McGee’s Leave it Alone and Rojas’ Together At Last. The show/shows are open until August 1st. The Art Collectors have a good review of the show, much more articulate and intelligent than whatever I would have said. Here are some pictures anyway:

Barry McGee
Clare Rojas
Barry McGee
Clare Rojas
Barry McGee

And it looks like McGee has already moved on to his next project. He is painting some murals in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, but not everyone in town to happy about that, graffiti as art and all…

Photos by fresh888

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James Jessop on pens and markers

James Jessop has made a video with SpineTV for all you graffiti nerds out there. James has a collection of markers and pens for tagging, from back in the mid 1980’s to the modern markers used today. In the video, he tests out each of these markers, goes through the history of his tags and even reveals one of the new secrets that graffiti writers have been taking advantage of this year. A must-see for those obsessed with graffiti history.

Via Hooked

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Agents of Change 0.3 and Remi in Santander

Remi/Rough and Jaybo have put together a two-man show in Santander called No Beginning No End. Here’s some of Remi’s work from that show. You can check out the rest of the show on Remi’s flickr.

But that’s not all Remi has been up to. Recently, he and the rest of the group Agents of Change painted a massive wall in Manchester. They made this video, but you can probably skip to 4 minutes in and just see the end result of their work:

I’ve heard people say that Agents of Change’s hands are similar to this piece that Zeus and Eine painted last year (and which Remi coincidentally painted over with the property owner’s permission as part of The Beautiful and The Canned), but Agents of Change have really crushed it in Manchester and I’m not sure if you can claim that any one person’s trademark is painting giant hands (here’s another piece with a series of hands by Run).

Photos by Remi/Rough

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Kolown in the woods

Kolown is an artist in the Philippines. Somebody is probably going to tell me that carving into trees is very damaging to them, but I’m not totally sure if it is or not, so in the mean time, I’m loving this face that Kolown has carved. It’s nice now, but I’d be interested to see what this tree looks like in 1, 5 or even 10 years. Ideally, I guess the face would be preserved, but it wouldn’t be immediately apparent that it was man-made.

Photo by Kolown

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New print from Kofie

Kofie‘s new print, Zirkulation eines Anti-Horizontes, looks beautiful and it’s available online at Rivera and Rivera. It’s a giclée though, and personally I wouldn’t buy a giclée by what you see online.

Zirkulation eines Anti-Horizontes is an edition of 100, sized 22 x 22 inches and is being sold for $275. The print technically isn’t being released until the 4th of July, but you can pre-order it now.