The guys from Primary Flight recently traveled to Havana, Cuba with El Mac, where he painted this mural. The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Europe and Union de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba also helped to arrange the project. El Mac’s piece is titled El corazón de un sueño palpita entre mis manos (The Heart of a Dream Beats Within My Hands).
Photos courtesy of Primary Flight
There are a lot of writers from the subway era who have tried to break into fine art. Some are great. Some are, quite frankly, not. Mare139 aka Carlos Mare is one of the better ones, and certainly one of the most underrated ones. Through his captivating sculptures, he has been bringing graffiti into the third dimension for decades, and his b-boy sketches look like what Picasso would have sketched if he’d lived to see breaking (and wasn’t so easily distracted/inspired by young women).
This week, Mare has a solo show of his b-boy pieces opening at Skalitzers in Berlin. Physical Graffiti: Art of the B-boy Dance opens on June 9th at 7pm, there’s an artist talk on June 12th at 6pm, and then the main opening dates for the exhibition are June 13th through the 30th.
Photos courtesy of Skalitzers
Neuzz was the latest artist to visit Atlanta for Living Walls Concepts. Here are a few shots of Neuzz and the wall, and a video by Dustin Chambers and Wil Hughes documenting the progress of the mural.
Next up for Living Walls Concepts: Evereman.
Photos by Wil Hughes and Bonham Johnson
Dscreet’s latest film in the DOTS+ series is an interview with Conor Harrington. It was filmed while Conor was prepping for his recent landmark show at Lazarides Rathbone.
Photo by Russell Darling
Adam Cost KRT and Set KRT did these pieces recently in Brooklyn. They’ve put in the hours and the years, so there’s nothing wrong with going the legal route now that people want to see your name on their property. The Cost posters are the same design that he used last year when he was commissioned to be on the cover of ShowPaper. Very cool.
As someone who looks at street art every day, usually online through photos where I’m told or I already know pretty much exactly what I’m looking at as soon as I see it, it’s not often that I still get to experience the joy of randomly coming across street art that truly surprises me and shakes me out of my dreary existence. But someone in New York is doing that for me lately. When I was last in NYC, I couldn’t help but come across the drippy splotches of spraypaint that have begun popping up all over the city. When my friend Rhiannon pointed them out to me, she called them jellyfish. And that seems about right. So, who is Jellyfish? Nobody I’ve spoken with seems to know. And, like most street art, it’s probably more fun to keep that a mystery. Would these work well on a mural organized by MaNY? Probably not. But they are fantastic as a pseudo-tag and for reactivating boring walls. Who needs style? The Jellyfish boil street art and graffiti down to the core essentials of thrill and activation of spaces.
Here are a few more Jellyfish:
Photos by bitchcakesny
All too often, I get the same basic press release in my inbox. It reads something like this:
Dear Arrested Motion editor,
Gallery X, the hippest gallery in the USA even though you’ve never heard of us before, is super excited about their upcoming show Lame Pun for a Name, a group show featuring prints from the world’s most exciting street artists. We have 15 artists you’ve never heard of or have heard of but don’t care about who we think are making a real splash and 2 artists you’ve heard of but whose prints we found on eBay for the purpose of including them in this show. Oh, and yes, we have a Banksy print! This is sure to be the best show ever in the history of the world even though we only just discovered that street art is a thing after my mom told me about this movie called Exit Through the Gift Shop.
I hope you’ll post about our show. An inconvenient to download and use pdf file is attached.
Sincerely,
Gallery Girl
Because of emails like that, my tolerance for group shows of prints is pretty low these days. I pretty much write them off as ignorable when I hear about them, even when I like some of the artists in the show. Well, I’m extremely thankful that two of my friends dragged me to New York’s Hendershot Gallery last week after I had written off their latest group print show, (Re)Print.
(Re)Print features ASVP, Clown Soldier, Chris Stain, Troy Lovegates, Labrona, Judith Supine and others. It achieves that combination of well-known and extremely talented but up-and-coming artists that nearly every group show strives for but few manage to pull off. If you’re looking for work by artists who don’t get the attention they deserve, (Re)Print is the place to see a whole lot of them. In particular, the new prints by Chris Stain and collages by Clown Soldier are a real treat.
Here are a few bits from the show, but if you’re in New York at all this summer, definitely try to make it over to Hendershot Gallery to see the entire show. (Re)Print is open through August 15th.
Photos courtesy of Hendershot Gallery
Update: This post should have been about Snyder’s lack of originality rather than a lack of creativity. As pointed out in the comments, Snyder has been drawing Doodle for many years. While perhaps creative, I still find much of Snyder’s work, particularly this piece, to be unoriginal. Maybe that’s worse.
From time to time, I have posted about Snyder. He seems like an enthusiastic artist, and that’s commendable. He also as a talent for finding good placement for his pieces.
Sure, Snyder’s best work was always a fair amount like something Banksy would or had come up with, but I tried to ignore that and find the positives about Snyder’s work. After all, how many contemporary stencil artists can say that they’ve never been a bit too inspired by Banksy at least once?
And then Snyder introduced a character into his work whom he named Doodle. Okay, the character looks like a stenciled version of Dran’s character whom Dran named Scribble, and they are pretty much the same character. Both are slightly mischievous young artists. Again, this alone was frustrating, but Dran isn’t particularly well-known outside of Europe, so maybe Snyder, who is based in LA, hadn’t heard of him. Maybe it was just a coincidence.
And then I saw the stencil by Snyder at the top of this post, which is actually one of at least two in a series of similar pieces. Again, I was reminded of Banksy and of Dran, even a specific piece by Banksy (the maid, shown above). But now another artist came to mind too: Saber. Revealing tags beneath the buff is pretty much exactly like Saber’s Ripped Tag series of canvases. Saber’s canvases are significantly better executed than Synder’s work, but the similarities are clear.
At first, I saw Snyder’s clear Banksy influence and I thought that it was a phase. I thought that he would eventually grow out of it and get his own style. Influences are one thing, but Snyder goes beyond that. As time has gone on, it is clear that Snyder has not only failed to develop a personal style, but he has perhaps even increased his reliance on the ideas of other artists.
This buff/zipper piece goes too far. It’s actually not a bad idea. But it is quite transparently 3 other artists’ ideas mashed into one with little original content added by Snyder.
As flattering as it may seem for artists’ to be inspired others’ work, at the heart of this issue is pretty simple: if you are going to take inspiration from others’ work or blatantly rip their ideas, then do it better and make it your own. Snyder has clearly done neither and that in itself is disappointing at best.
Photos Snyder, Wokka, Marie Aschehoug-Clauteaux and Lois Stavsky
I think we actually did a pretty good job this week on Vandalog covering what needs to be covered, but here are the few things we missed:
Photo by MOMO
You know those annoying LA street artists who popped up after Mr. Brainwash’s story in Exit Through the Gift Shop inspired everyone in that city who wasn’t starring in a film (and some who are) to start putting up posters and stickers? Well, some of them do have at least one redeemable quality: They disrupt advertisements. And that’s what Cyrcle and a few others talk about in this film for Pharrell’s YouTube channel i am OTHER. In terms of info about the ridiculous mural law battles in LA, it’s not a bad piece (although there’s no appearance from Saber, this in only part one of the story). Just try to ignore all the cheesiness from the artists.
