Vandalog – A Street Art Blog

February 6, 2014February 6, 2014

Cash For Your Warhol’s answering machine, immortalized

Geoff Hargadon of Cash For Your Warhol fame has a show of new work open now at Gallery Kayafas in Boston. I love Geoff and his work, so it’s great to see him take things further and introduce totally new work with this show, Warhol Coming Soon. You can head over to The Boston Globe to read about some of the new directions that are introduced in this show, because I want to focus on how the Cash For Your Warhol project is being extended.

In case you’re unfamiliar, here’s how Cash For Your Warhol works: For years, Geoff has been placing signs and stickers around the country with the phrase “Cash For Your Warhol” followed by a phone number. The signs emulate the CASH FOR GOLD or CASH FOR YOUR HOUSE signs that are so ubiquitous on telephone poles across the USA.

People really have called up that phone number, some to complain or ask what the hell the sign is about, and other to try and sell their Warhol’s. For this show, Geoff has transcribed some of the best voicemails of the Cash For Your Warhol inbox and made them into wall plaque sculptures like something Jenny Holzer might produce.

Street artists don’t always have great opportunities for feedback on their work, and of course even gallery artists have limited opportunities for feedback because honest responses are just hard to come by, but Geoff doesn’t have that problem. In the street art world, I think many of us like to believe that most street art improves streets and that people love it. And that may often be the case, but sometimes it pisses people off or just confuses them. In what I imagine was an unintended consequence of the Cash For Your Warhol Project, these plaques give a bit of insight into the complex relationship that street art has with the general public.

And of course, there’s also signs of the project’s impetus: A depressed economy and the transformation of art into a luxury good and an investment opportunity.

So yeah, I’m really digging these plaques. You can see them yourself in person at Gallery Kayafas in Boston at Geoff Hargadon’s show Warhol Coming Soon, open now through March 1st.

Photos by Geoff Hargadon

February 4, 2014January 30, 2014

Tim Hans shoots… Icy & Sot

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Last summer, Tim Hans and I visited a rooftop in Brooklyn. Tim was there to photograph (if I’m remember correctly) Vexta for his continuing series of photo-portraits of artists. But what we found there was a gathering of street artists all painting and having fun in this very unexpected location. The rooftop project was organized by Iranian stencil artists and brothers Icy & Sot, who have called New York City home for a couple of years now. Regular Vandalog readers will remember the fantastic new mural of theirs that I posted about in late December. I recently asked the brothers a few questions…

RJ: How are you both doing?

Icy & Sot: We are doing better, keeping ourselves busy with work.

RJ: It was inspiring to see your recent mural on the LES. What does that wall mean for you?

Icy & Sot: It’s simple, we hate guns, obviously for personal reasons plus all the related crimes we see in the news all the time. It’s just frustrating to see how easy is to get a gun in the US.

RJ: Why do you use stencils?

Icy & Sot: We started using stencils back in Iran because it was quickest way to share our vision with the people in the streets, and now we are in love with stencils.

RJ: So Tim and I came up to your roof one day last summer to find probably a dozen artists painting and hanging out. What was this rooftop project about?

Icy & Sot: We had access to a very big rooftop (connecting an entire block) at our house. First we did a piece and then we decide to tell our friends to come and paint and hang out. We love our friends from the art community and was great to include the works of about 30 artists from different parts of the world.

RJ: What’s next for Icy and Sot?

Icy & Sot: We are planning to go to Europe in the summer to work on some walls and show our work there. And we are working on curating a group show, showing the works of NY artists in Iran and our friends from Iran’s work here in NY.

Photo by Tim Hans

February 3, 2014January 30, 2014

Street art as an experience and an anonymous gift

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Why do people collect art? Perhaps part of the reason is a memory or an experience associated with the object. The possessions I have most affection for were bought on holiday or given to me by a friend. There’s a cool story that goes with them. If we accept that artistic experience is in part about feeling a meaningful connection with an object, can the process of collection also elicit emotions and memories, beyond the aesthetic of the work?

I painted aerosol portraits onto wooden board and pad-locked them onto walls in Melbourne. I then hid the key somewhere in the city and left a puzzle to the key’s location, with the instruction “find the key, unlock and keep the painting”. The clues required participants to hunt and climb within the forgotten spaces of the city, sometimes scaling the outside of a building to the 2nd floor. I designed adventures, transgressing into the dead-ends within a network of thoroughfares; the unfamiliar within the familiar.

Continue reading “Street art as an experience and an anonymous gift”

January 31, 2014February 10, 2014

Alex Senna paints the world as we feel it

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I have always admired certain artists’ ability to reflect life, not as it is, but as we perceive it; where emotions are more indicative of how we view the world than our senses. That’s what art is all about, right? Feeling something.

Alex Senna is an artist and illustrator from São Paulo, whose expressive, lanky characters bring a softness to their urban setting. These characters and their interactions typically revolve around love and relationships, whether it be a romance between an elderly couple, playful young lovers or sentiments of a lasting friendship. Senna’s works invite their audiences into these intimate interactions and evoke a feeling of nostalgia.

Much like Know Hope, Senna uses universal symbols such as hearts, birds, raindrops, and musical notes in his street work. Typically using just black and white, his murals treat walls like the frames of a comic book, and the interactions between his characters feel equally animated.

Senna has done artwork for Nike, Adidas, and a window display for Hermès. Last year he participated in “Shoot For the Moon” in Miami during Art Basel, which was his first international festival. He later put up a whopping 30 murals in London in 40 days. Hopefully that creative energy persists and we’ll see more work from Alex in the future.

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Photos by Alex Senna

January 30, 2014January 28, 2014

Boa Mistura presents Somos Luz (We Are Light)

Spanish collective Boa Mistura has premiered their documentary based on Somos Luz (We Are Light), a project created in Panama last year in the community of Chorrillos.

Boa Mistura highlights a distinction between community based projects and street art for the sake of decoration or self-appropriating places. This work and many of their previous projects serve as agents for communities to trace memories, create narratives and involve a collective identity that serves to beautify their public space. The debate whether street art is done for the public or for the self- interested artist is becoming more widely discussed as many artists feel inclined to give back to the communities they temporarily work in. I have yet seen a collective that embodies so delicately this participatory inclination of sanctioned street art and community engagement. Community based projects are another vehicle for artists to push their perspectives and, at times, their visual tendencies and possibly propel more discussions that can give us varied answers to “what the hell are we doing with these large-scale murals?”

Video courtesy of Boa Mistura

January 29, 2014February 11, 2014

Tim Hans shoots… Dennis McNett

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Back in November, Tim Hans stopped by Known Gallery just as Dennis McNett was setting up for a show there. As part of our continuing series of photo-portraits of artists by Tim, we’re finally publishing those photos and I emailed a few questions over to McNett. My bad on the delay, but I’m glad we finally have a chance to share these images and chat with one of my favorite block printers.

RJ: How has teaching printmaking at Pratt affected your own art?

Dennis McNett: I’m not teaching currently. When I have the last year or two, it’s usually only one class. I could go on a long tangent about the whole art school thing.

I wouldn’t say it has effected my own work. I’ve been making what I make and doing what I do since I was a kid. What I do walk away with from teaching would be passing on a medium, meeting some great students and being able to cheerlead for their ideas the way Richard Mock did for me. That makes it worth doing.

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RJ: Your work seems to have such a focus on nature, or at least some version of nature. Do you get enough exposure to nature while living in the city?

McNett: Fortunately I get to leave the city quite often. My folks live in Virginia on a mountain and I’m able to go there at least 3 times a year. When I am able to be by the ocean (especially by the ocean), in the forest, in the desert, etc… I feel clarity, like my batteries are charged and truly inspired. I feel humbled by how perfect, beautiful, diverse, micro/macro and complex the whole damn place is. But, to answer you directly, No, I do not get to be in nature as much as I’d like to be and I’m planning to leave NYC for that and several other reasons.

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RJ: Are you trying to do something largely different with your various static artworks and your performances, or are those two sets of work extensions of each other?

McNett: I feel like it’s all coming from the same place. The performance/happenings are a lot of fun. They are more about doing something anyone can participate in, contribute to and usually tell a story stemming from a “mythology” I started in 2006 about the Wolfbat. The 2D work I do alone in the studio, but sometimes that work pertains to the mythology. They could be artifacts like shields or characters from the stories. Sometimes the 2D stuff is just what ever comes to mind like a Leopardsnake (half Leo half snake) which I just daydreamed about and seemed fun to draw/create. Really I just do whatever I am feeling or thinking about at the moment and use what ever medium makes sense for the idea.

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RJ: What is it about printmaking that appeals to you?

McNett: I’ve done sculptures, masks, performances, installations, graphics and woodcarvings. I think above all else, I just love the carved mark. I’ve been making carvings for over 20 years now. I can build and use a lot of other mediums but still just love that mark. I use prints of that mark on pretty much everything I make from 30ft ships, temples or just prints. With printmaking you can also make multiples and I use this to generate my own collage material/drawing material of my carved patterns and images. Once I have the drawing material I can cover large areas pretty quickly. It all just has the flavor I like to work with.

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RJ: What have you got coming up next?

McNett: I’m working with the Philadelphia Mural Arts program in February. I’ll be building a sculpture, doing a mural and working with community kids the entire month. Then potentially Austin to do a project around SXSW, which may be another performative event. I a show in Houston in May. I’m considering moving out west after that.

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Photos by Tim Hans

January 29, 2014January 28, 2014

City as Canvas: A rare collection on view soon in NYC

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One of the greatest early supporters of graffiti artists was Martin Wong, a painter who lived in New York City during the city’s Golden Age of graffiti. Wong collected the work of young artists working outdoors like Lee Quinones, Rammellzee and Keith Haring. Wong’s collection is perhaps the best existing set of artworks that together give a sense of modern graffiti’s early days in the city where it (effectively) began. In the mid-90’s, Wong donated the whole thing to the Museum of the City of New York. It’s a collection that early writers often tell me about with a sense of wonder, and they always suggest that I have a look at the collection because I could learn a thing or two from it. Now, works from the are about to be exhibited publicly at the Museum of the City of New York for the first time.

City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection opens next Tuesday the 4th at the Museum of the City of New York. I’m excited to see so much early work (nearly 150 pieces) in person, and to hopefully get a sense of how Wong saw the early graffiti scene. In addition to some early canvas work by artists like Lady Pink and Daze, the collection includes a subset of work that should be particularly interesting for those of us interested in the history of graffiti: perhaps the only collection of blackbook sketches in a museum possession. The show also includes a new short film by Charlie Ahearn and photographs by Ahearn, Martha Cooper, Jack Stewart and Jon Naar. In case it’s not already obvious, let me just state that this sounds like it will be a must-see exhibition for graffiti geeks.

The show is accompanied by a new book by Carlo McCormick and the show’s curator Sean Corcoran.

City as Canvas opens February 4th and runs through July 27th.

Photo courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York

January 28, 2014

From Bogota “Este Territorio Tambien Es Nuestro”

In a city where public graphic expressions are defined as a symptom of low standards of living and education, the wave of redefining what it means to reclaim spaces through throw ups, bombing and large scale murals, continues to fortify a new sense of citizenship and belonging. Bogota carries a lot of burred histories and identities that are making their way toward becoming visible as efforts of expression geared to “include” rather than “seclude” become a higher priority in contemporary cities.

Last July, Bogota Street Art participated in the First Meeting of Writers and Urban Art in Bogota, as part of a public policy that aimed to change the perception of graffiti and street art in the city. This video shows the process of combing artists from Colombia and Peru in one strip of 26h Street, a highway that splits downtown Bogota in half and stretches all the way to the airport. Participating artists include Guache (Bogotá), Toxicomano (Bogotá), Lesivo (Bogotá), Entes & Pesimo (Peru), and Elliot Tupac (Peru).

Video courtesy of Albeiro Toro Ayala

January 28, 2014January 25, 2014

Next week: Eine in NYC at Judith Charles Gallery

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Ben Eine has a show, Heartfelt, opening on February 5th at Judith Charles Gallery on The Bowery. Somewhat surprisingly, Heartfelt will be Eine’s first NYC solo show. I’ve always had a very strong personal relationship with Eine’s art, as his letters peppered London’s streets when I was first getting into street art, and his SCARY piece was probably the first piece of street art to really surprise and thrill me when I came across it unexpectedly. I’m looking forward to checking out Heartfelt, and I’m hopefully that Eine will leave a few pieces on the streets of New York during his visit as well.

Heartfelt opens February 5th from 6-9pm and runs through March 16th at Judith Charles Gallery, 196 Bowery in New York City.

Photo courtesy of Eine

January 27, 2014

All Your Walls – Hosier Lane – Melbourne (Stage 2)

I am extremely late with this post, it’s been a busy last month or so, but I wanted to share the 2nd session of All Your Walls Melbourne, a satellite event we ran in late November as a part of the MELBOURNE NOW exhibition held by the National Gallery of Victoria. You can read all about the event in my previous post here.

The final 3 days were definitely not as hectic, I’d say that is due to the fact we didn’t have 6 massive scissor lifts moving around the lanes all day, but it was a great way to finish off the event.

Artists starting arriving early on the 1st day and worked all the way up until the official opening. The last 3 days of the event attracted thousands of visitors coming to see the finished laneways. All stakeholders were delighted with the final result, a full repaint of the entire Hosier and Rutledge Lane precinct, something that has never been done before. The event also received some great reviews.

Check out this great video from EdInFocus that gives you a good idea of what the event was all about.

All Your Walls Recap Video from EdInFocus on Vimeo.

From my personal perspective the importance of this event extended beyond the event itself. Rutledge Lane (Hosier’s lesser known cousin) has become known as a “practice lane” due to the poor quality of the work being painted there. All Your Walls showed Melbourne that Rutledge Lane can be just as good as Hosier Lane and in my opinion should remain that way. It was a refreshing sight to see that for several weeks after the event the work was respected (usually it gets tagged and painted over by complete rubbish, that does not deserve to be in the lane, again in my opinion). It was also both surprising and pleasing to see that local artists have begun to maintain the lanes, without being asked.

My feelings about Rutledge Lane are in line with my recent submission/response to the Melbourne City Council Graffiti Management Policy. Melbourne City Council recently proposed officially classifying Rutledge lane as a practice lane, which I was strongly opposed to. Encouraging this behaviour encourages a “do as you wish” attitude in Rutledge lane, which before All Your Walls was at it’s worst state in a long time. (Adrian Doyle’s Empty Nursery Blue project also had an impact on this lane). [The policy also contains some great ideas and a fresh new attitude towards street art in Melbourne, for example now the council will leave street art alone, unless asked. Previously the council would contact building owners and ask if they would like it removed. I think this is a pretty progressive attitude for a council, even though the council knows that Melbourne would not be the same without street art].

One other important thing I would like to clear up, especially for my readers in Melbourne. While All Your Walls was indeed organised by a number of parties (NGV, Land of Sunshine, Invurt, Just Another Agency and Hosier INC), Hosier and Rutledge lanes remain free for ANYONE to paint, anytime. That being said, don’t cap what you can’t burn, seriously, what an embarrassment some of the tags and pieces are over the top of some REAL work.

Check out some of the amazing work from the final 3 days as well as the amazing 3D mapping piece created by DVATE and Grant Osborne.