Last week we announced The Art of Comedy, a series of art installations and murals with The New York Comedy Festival that Wayne Rada and I curated. The Art of Comedy also coincided with solo shows by all three of the artists involved: Ron English, gilf!, and Hanksy. Due to Hurricane Sandy, both the official unveiling of the murals that these artists have painted in Little Italy and their solo show openings have been delayed by a week. So, here’s what the calendar looks like now for The Art of Comedy and those gallery shows:
November 7th-11th: The Art of Comedy installations by Ron English, Hanksy, and gilf! are up in lounge inside of the comedy club Carolines on Broadway.
November 10th at noon: The Art of Comedy Art Crawl starts at Caffe Roma on Mulberry and Broome streets and continues down Mulberry towards Canal Street as we check out Little Italy’s latest murals.
gilf! is the type of person to engage you with her art, both visually and verbally. Though the messages are implicit in her imagery, she is quick to drop her paint can to discuss her pieces with anyone who catches her in progress. When entering into a curated mural project, I wondered how an area that was not known as a street art haven would greet these confrontational, but satirical, stencils. These issues as well as several others were discussed in an interview with gilf! for Vandalog as she prepares for her work with the New York Comedy Festival. – Rhiannon Platt
R: Could you talk a little about the overall message of your work?
G: It’s mostly social commentary about current issues and things that are affecting us a society, both globally and nationally. I feel like a lot of people don’t pay attention to shit. So, if I can put it on the street and get them to consider a different perspective about things concerning their everyday life that’s kind of why I do what I do.
gilf! for Welling Court
R: And you don’t restrict it to just politics?
G: It’s not always political. It can be environmental, social, government changes are I guess not what I would consider political always. I always focus on things that I’m passionate about and that I find to be unjust or problematic.
gilf! in Williamsburg
R: With working for the New York Comedy Festival, how do you think parody will play into this usual message of political or other contexts that you usually try to convey?
G: You can have something with a message that can also be entertaining. If you look at the Colonel Sanders piece I did it talks about things that are really nasty, like genetically modified situation going on in our fast food lifestyle, but it’s also kinda funny because the thing has six wings. Visually it’s not something you would expect. I think using parody in art can allow people to be more focused on the work because they are laughing at it, but then it maybe the message clicks a little afterwards. You’ve got to lure them a little bit, there’s got to be something appealing.
R: Will you be working with all new imagery for this event?
G: All but one I believe. For the most part it’s going to be all new and things based around the election and some political things that I find to be kind of entertaining and weird.
gilf! for the New York Comedy Festival
R: What does it mean for you to be working in a space like NoLita?
G: Well it’s funny because it’s not a neighborhood where I would usually put work up. Thinking about the type of people who walk through Little Italy. You get some native New Yorkers, but mainly my work will be interacting with tourists. It’s going to be the people from the middle of the country, or France, or wherever that go to Little Italy to see the character and novelty of it. That’s going to be cool because it’s not people that I usually talk to. The work is usually in Brooklyn or downtown. It’s usually in neighborhoods where I hang out versus neighborhoods where you get a lot of people who would never see street art. If you’re from Oklahoma or Virginia, there’s not a lot of wheatpaste or stencils or whatever going up. So it will be interesting to see how those people interact with what I’m doing.
gilf! and Veng in Baltimore
R: It’s probably an older demographic than your usual neighborhoods too.
G: Totally. It’s gonna be a lot of families I imagine. Kids and their parents and middle aged family of four kind of people. I was also excited to talk about the election because it will go up right before the vote, not that it’s going to influence anything because New York is going to go to Obama because it’s a Democratic state. Still, just commenting on it’s a weird façade and why our voter system is totally flawed will be interesting to see how people who are of the voting age would think about that.
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Guggenheim –Stillspotting nyc isa multidisciplinary project that takes the museum’s Architecture and Urban Studies programming out into the streets of the city’s five boroughs.
Asia Society Museum – Bound Unbound: Lin Tianmiao represents the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United States.
Creative Time –Creative Time Reports features Artists’ analysis of pressing news and events from around the world.
Association of Public Art – Open Air, an interactive art installation that allows participants’ voices to transform the night sky over Philadelphia’s historic Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
Curator’s Office – Progressive contemporary micro-gallery and curatorial service bureau for offsite projects and exhibitions in Washington, DC.
Art Miami – Miami’s premier anchor fair, showcases the best in modern and contemporary art from more than 100 international art galleries. December 4-9, 2012
Pacific Northwest College of Art – For over 100 years, PNCA has served as a creative hub for artists and designers with an educational philosophy that emphasizes individualized curricula, independent inquiry and cross-disciplinary exchange.
NYU Steinhardt – Graduate art programs in Studio Art, Art Education, Art Therapy, Visual Culture: Costume Studies, and Visual Arts Administration.
International Center of Photography – The ICP-Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies offers a curriculum of professional and studio practice, critical study, and Resident Artist Projects.
School of Visual Arts – Molecular Cuisine: The Politics of Taste is an interdisciplinary conference investigating the importance of taste from the perspectives of the culinary arts, sociology, art history and theory, anthropology, as well as the cognitive, material and biological sciences.
artnet Auctions – Shepard Fairey: The Giant in Society and Politics, a special sale of over 30 rare prints by renowned Street artist Shepard Fairey.
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Mixed Greens – In the current exhibition, Night For Day,Joseph Smolinskyuses drawing and sculpture to explore subtle shifts of light, time, space, and climate.
School of Visual Arts – The MA in Critical Theory and the Arts is an intensive yearlong study of the problems and questions of making art today.
New York Academy of Sciences – Science and the Seven Deadly Sins – A vice – ridden series of events featuring scientists, authors, urban planners and many more.
Stikman, a fan favorite street artist along the East Coast, has a solo show opening on Friday at Philadelphia’s Stupid Easy Gallery. Stikman 20.1 Celebrating 20 Years Hanging Around Philly is the Philly version of his 20th anniversary show that was on at Pandemic Gallery back in the springtime. If Amtrak doesn’t get running again by Friday for me to get up to NYC for the shows that Ron English, Hanksy and Gilf! have on Thursday and The Art of Comedy art crawl/mural unveiling on Saturday, I’ll be spending my Friday at Stupid Easy checking out Stikman’s show. This will definitely be the opening to be at in Philly this week.
Stupid Easy Gallery is at 307 Market Street, between 3rd and 4th streets, and the opening runs from 6-9pm on November 2nd.
The artist and graffiti writer by the names of The Reader, Read More Books, Books, Boans and others (who has a big new piece up in NYC) has a show on earlier this month at Ditch Projects in Springfield Oregon. The closing party for the show is Halloween night, where there will be a concert at the gallery by White Manna, Midday Veil and Testface. Entrance will cost $5.
Read up in a down economy does not look like the show of an artist struggling with the transition from street to gallery, something that most street artists and graffiti writers who eventually work indoors under that outdoor identity seem to experience as a challenge. While this isn’t The Reader’s first time indoors, he’s definitely more well-known for his graffiti. It’s so great to see an artist whose outdoor work I love so much transition indoors so smoothly.
UPDATE: THIS OPENING OF GILF!’S SHOW HAS BEEN DELAYED DUE TO THE HURRICANE. IT WILL NOW BE ON NOVEMBER 8TH FROM 5-9PM (SAME LOCATION OF COURSE).
This ThursdayNEXT THURSDAY from 5-9pm, Gilf! there will be a public opening for Gilf!’s solo show at Galerie Swanström (136 Sullivan Street, 3rd Floor, New York City). I was really impressed with Gifl!’s booth at Fountain New York earlier this year, and so I’m excited to see what she’s done for this show. Check back later this week or early next for photos from the show and from The Art of Comedy, which Gilf! is a part of along with Hanksy and Ron English.
Faile recently returned from a trip to Mongolia sponsored by Tiger Translate, where they unveiled their latest sculptural creation and some street work. Over the past few months, Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller (aka Faile) have been working closely with Mongolian sculptor Bat Munkh to bring this colossal piece to life in its permanent home. Faile was kind enough to invite me to their studio and talk about their experiences unveiling the sculpture in Mongolia and their thoughts on creating their first permanent piece. – Caroline Caldwell
Patrick Miller: We made this sculpture, which is of an image we did in 2009 called “Eat With the Wolf” and it’s sort of this businessman tearing away a suit, wearing a wolf pelt. He’s placed in their national park, Ulan Bator. Behind the sculpture is this mountain preserve and then he’s looking on to all this new development. So this will all be a grassline, 1600 acre park. It’s wild to have a permanent sculpture in this city.
It’s pretty amazing. It really couldn’t have been a better sort of symbolic thing of what’s happening in Mongolia right now. Basically, they’ve come across all these minerals in mining, copper and gold, and the Russians and the Chinese are descending upon Mongolia to really try and mine the shit out of it. It’s sort like, what’s gonna happen to the city and how will the people actually benefit this? Or will the country just be mined for its resources and kind of left as a shell? So there are a lot of these issues going on there right now, which made this sculpture feel pretty timely.
This image came out of a series we did called “Lost in Glimmering Shadows” and it was sort of imagining if Native Americans had come back to the city today and retaken the land. This image was really about this crisis within of battling between greed and a connection to nature. So we’d been working on this sculpture for awhile on its own with Charlie Becker, who’s a sculptor we work with a lot, and Tiger Translate and the Mongolian Arts Council approached us and asked if we’d be interested in doing a sculpture out there which essentially led to doing that.
Patrick McNeil: We submitted a couple different ideas and this is the one that the arts council kind of gravitated to because of, I think, the wolf symbolism. We did a couple other things but this one just kind of resonated the best. There were a couple pitches that we did that got lost in translation, or it just didn’t make sense with the Mongolian culture.
It was a really tight timeline too, and we already had this sculpted since we’d been working on a miniature version of this one. So with the timeline and everything, this one seemed to make the most sense to execute in the 3 months that we did it in.
Caroline Caldwell: Do you think the Mongolian people will understand the Native American symbolism or do you think they’ll interpret it within their own culture?
McNeil: You know, if you look at their culture, it’s very similar to a lot of the symbols and things that weave through the Native American culture; with wolf being a power animal and horses, the shamanism, and even just the nomadic lifestyle.
Miller: They actually think that the Native Americans came over from Mongolia and Upper Asia. So yeah, I definitely think they’ll have a strong connection with that idea.
Ron English‘s latest solo show opens this Thursday evening at Opera Gallery‘s NYC location in SoHo. The main theme of Crucial Fiction is an attempt by Ron to paint the sort of images that his 8-year-old self would dream up but couldn’t express with such technical excellence. From what I’ve seen, the results center on maddening scenes of Ron’s custom-toy dreamworlds, like the one above. And by “custom-toy,” I don’t just mean the stuff that he turns into vinyl gold with brands like Kidrobot but also the one-off creations and strange combinations he comes up with that look something like very advanced versions of Sid’s mutant toysToy Story.
Weather permitting, I’ll be coming up from Philadelphia for this show (as well as Hanksy and Gilf!’s openings the same night), so New Yorkers really have no excuse not to be there.
All crew members. Photo courtesy of Michael Danischewski.
Since forming in 2006 the AWOL Crew have been producing some amazing work. (The crew is: Adnate, Deams, Itch, Li-Hill, Lucy Lucy and Slicer). This is the collectives first group show since they painted the NGV studio (National Gallery of Victoria) mural back in 2011.
With backgrounds predominately in graffiti it’s great to see the guys pushing their artistic skills. Each artist with their own signature style, but also as a group, the collaboration between the crew for Fabric, seamlessly combining elements of each others work into pieces is hands down the best work I’ve seen from the crew.
The exhibition itself was also somewhat unique and different to most shows. The show was announced a while ago and was to be held at a secret location (announced the day before the show). Not knowing what to expect when I arrived made it even more special. The space was amazing. An old gas works warehouse suited the show really well and provided the perfect backdrop for the art.
Make sure you check out the video. Also, here’s a few shots from the show.
