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
Weird and wondrous characters continue to make their way onto the streets of Bushwick. Here are a few I came upon today:
Photos by Lois Stavsky
Got an email the other day with some sad new for Melbourne and some awesome news for our friends in Europe and the USA. Reka’s moving overseas and having a final show at Backwoods to celebrate. I love his work on found objects so I’m really looking forward to this show.
From the Backwoods press release:
After a ten year career defacing the streets and gallery walls of Melbourne, Reka is packing up, moving overseas and having one last hurrah. He will be holding an open studio for one night only, displaying a new body of work exclusively painted on found objects.
Using spray cans and rusted metal found from walking the train lines and abandoned factories, Reka has organically used each aspect of his natural element to create a process- driven concept, turning everything from the cans’ paper labels to the folds of oxidised sheet metal into self-contained artworks.
On June 20th, Reka is opening up his studio for a behind the scenes look at his new paintings and mixed media works, plus throwing in some paintings from the past decade for good measure. It’ll be an exhibition and leaving party all rolled into one, so come down and join Reka for a one final beer.
More preview photos after the jump… Continue reading “Reka – Open Studio at Backwoods Gallery”
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
Be Free is one of my favourite Melbourne street artists. Like many of Melbourne’s street artists, I noticed Be Free just appear out of nowhere a few years ago. Since then it’s always a pleasure to stumble upon a new piece while walking the streets.
Be Free uses real playing cards, string, and other props (even a table and chair) which makes the pieces even more visually exciting and makes them come to life. The pieces are unique and innovative and adds a much needed breath of fresh air into the street art scene, bringing something new and different…
I caught up with Be Free and this is what we talked about…
LM: Tell me about your background. How did you get into street art?
Be Free: I grew up in Adelaide, Australia and then moved to Melbourne to get into the art and music seen. I always liked seeing art on the streets, whether it was tags, pieces or characters as long as it said something to me and made me feel something. So I guess I just really wanted to be a part of the culture.
LM: What does your name mean?
Be Free: I write ‘be free’ as a reminder to myself to stay young and really spend all my time doing what I love and want is important to me. Also as a statement to others that many need to hear those words.
LM: What do you enjoy most about the whole street art process? The creation, the night missions etc?
Be Free: The process is very important for me because it’s quite timely and is the perfect head space, I can really lose myself. The street side of things is the opposite, I feel so alive going out on late night stealth missions.
LM: Who or what inspires you?
Be Free: So many things but basically I just want to have fun with life. I love dirty gritty walls or spaces that are too plain and they just need to be messed with. Taggers inspire me because their ability to climb up to the top of a building and leave their mark, I always know it’s possible to climb something if there is a tag up there.
LM: Which artists are you into at the moment? Local and International.
Be Free: There are a good handful of artist that I love which are; Shida, Lucy Lucy, Suki, David Choe, Sam Keith(The Maxx), David Mack(Kabuki), Toggs, Mio and Elbow Toe there are to many…
LM: Where do you work from and what is your studio space like?
Be Free: I wish I could afford a studio space, I just live in my art it’s a bit chaotic but it works for now.
LM: What is always in your “toolkit”?
Be Free: Markers, Liquid nail, paste, a bunch of different knifes, cans, gaff and a pack of cards.
LM: What has been the highlight (or highlights) of your career to date?
Be Free: Not sure, the whole thing is a highlight… I just love dripping paint from high places. It’s also amazing to see how people interact with the work. There is one piece I did with the Be Free girl sitting at a table drinking peppermint tea and someone sent me a picture of their little girl drinking tea on the other side of the table with their own tea cup, cute as!
LM: Tell me your pieces and the use of cards/string/props etc in your work.. I love it! Where did these ideas come from?
Be Free: I got the idea with the cards from a friend in Adelaide, he use to have cards scatted on his walls. A bit of an Alice & Wonderland fan, I loved hanging out in that house and so I just start using that idea with the little girl. I like to think of ways I can try to bring my character in this world, so I like using 3D props like winding string around objects and making little tables and chairs. I love using all kinds of different mediums.
LM: What’s coming up in 2012 and beyond for Be Free?
Be Free: I’ve just started a collaboration project with an amazing artist ‘Erin Greer’; it’s a relationship between a bunch of monsters and a girl. We are going to be painting in the streets & warehouses. We will see where it goes…
Photos by Darcy Gladwin, Rowena Naylor and courtesy of Be Free
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
