Weekend link-o-rama

D*face sticker

Happy new year! Between snow in NYC and the general slowness around this time of year, not much going on this week. Here’s a bit of what I’ve been enjoying though:

Photo by Delete08

Small Acts of Resistance – Swoon, Armsrock and more at BRP

Photo by unusualimage

Small Acts of Resistance, the latest show at Black Rat Projects, opened on Thursday evening. It’s another one of my dream group shows from Black Rat, with a number of my favorite artists represented. Peter Kennard in particular seems to have really outdone himself with his installation, although I’m hoping to see some more high-res images of that work. Here are a few photos of work by Armsrock, Swoon, Peter Kennard and Know Hope:

Armsrock. Photo by walkingwalls
Peter Kennard. Photo by unusualimage. Click image to view large
Swoon. Photo by unusualimage
Swoon. Photo by unusualimage
Know Hope. Photo by unusualimage

Photos by unusualimage and walkingwalls

Small Acts of Resistance at Black Rat Projects

Swoon, from her current show in Paris

The next show at Black Rat Projects is a group show with some of my favorite artists. Small Acts of Resistance opens on November 4th and includes Know Hope, Armsrock, Matt Small, Dotmasters, Swoon and Peter Kennard. It’s awesome to see Armsrock back at Black Rat Press and Know Hope showing there for the first time. Admittedly, Dotmasters may seem a bit out of place at first, but he did recently paint that wall at Nuart that everyone loved. As for how Swoon will be involved in this show, she will be doing a large installation, presumably similar to her show on now in Paris.

Photo by Guillotine

Weekend link-o-rama

A mobile projection by Armsrock

Here’s what I missed this week, or where people just wrote things that I couldn’t do or wrote them better than I could:

Photo by Armsrock

Weekend link love

Billboard by Mobstr

This link post is definitely going to be a weekly thing. Hopefully it will allow me to link to things that I just haven’t had the time to cover here on the blog, my Twitter or Vandalog’s Facebook page. So here’s what you may have missed in street art this week:

  • My Love For You Is A Stampede of Horses and Arrested Motion have two sets of amazing photos from Fecal Face‘s 10 year anniversary show at The Luggage Store in SF. This show has a pretty sick line up including Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Jim Houser, Swoon and Maya Hayuk.
  • Nychos’ solo show at Pure Evil Gallery (in cooperation with End of The Line) opened on Thursday. Go here for the press release sort of info or go here for photos from the opening.
  • That I May See, Matt Small’s latest solo show, opened last week at Black Rat Projects and it looks absolutely stunning. My family and I can’t thank Matt enough for his support of the Robert Shitima School in Zambia, which is where Matt and Black Rat Press have decided to donate 40% of the proceeds from this show.
  • Eelus, Logan Hicks, Eine, Lucy McLachlan and others are headed to Gambia next month for the Wide Open Walls project.
  • OFFSET has once again put together an interesting conference of creatives who will be speaking next month (October 1st-3rd) in Dublin. OFFSET 2010 will have presentations from Gary Baseman, Steve Powers, Marc and Sara Schiller of Wooster Collective and many more. Early bird tickets are available online for 150 euros (with discounts for students thankfully).
  • A very touching work of street art in Brooklyn.
  • Just Seeds has put together Resourced, a set for political posters that you can download and print at home. There are designs by Gaia, Armsrock, Chris Stain, Josh MacPhee and many more artists.
  • When I first heard about JR’s new Unframed project, I didn’t really care for it. Basically, JR is wheatpasting other photographers (often famous) photographs around in cities. To me, this sort came out of left field. I don’t mind when Blek le Rat does similar things, but with JR, I always liked the stories behind the photos as much as the images themselves. I thought that with Unframed, that aspect of the art would go away. Luckily, Angelo at FAME Festival reassured me in an email and said once I learned more about the project, these would be just as interesting as the rest of JR’s art. Because I trust Angelo, I waited and didn’t write anything about Unframed or JR’s piece at FAME Festival. Earlier this week, Hi-Fructose’s blog posted a better explanation of the project as well as some photos of Unframed taking place in Switzerland. As usual, Angelo was right and after reading that post on Hi-Fructose, I’ve been convinced about Unframed.

Photo by Mobstr

Armsrock in Egypt

Armsrock was in Cairo, Egypt recently for a Streets of Cairo festival. Naturally, he did some work outside, mostly more events in his continuing series of projecting drawings onto city walls.

Armsrock also put up at least one wheatpaste in Cairo. With permission, he pasted one image of an Egyptian man outside of Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery:

But by the next day, Egyptian police had seen the artwork and decided that they didn’t like it. The police painted the figure white:

Armsrock’s reaction? Not what you might have expected:

When I interact with the streets I want something to happen, some sort of situation should occur, and it always does. I have only never experienced such a direct form of censorship before, and expressed in such an interesting manner, and that was what I thought was a good thing.

You can read more about what Armsrock thought of the censorship at The Daily News Egypt and his blog.

Photos by Armsrock

While I was cut off from the world…

BETTEN in NYC. Photo by a friend of the artist.

Since the end of May until a few days ago, I’d been more or less cut off from the street art world. I was driving around Europe with my friends. That’s not particularly important, though I would like to thank Logan Hicks, Ripo, Paulo, C215, Nunca and (especially) Angelo for spending time with us.

Here’s some of the things that I missed while I was away…

  • Penny’s latest piece kicks ass
  • Os Gêmeos have been crazy busy, so here’s one of the things they did: A few paintings at FAME Festival.
  • And Blu has been to FAME recently too.
  • I’m loving a lot of the pieces Skewville’s show Shift Work Disorder at Factory Fresh.
  • Some local residents completely misinterpreted the meaning behind some Shepard Fairey murals and painted them over. Actually a really interesting story. I suppose that when it is a reality of everyday life, people don’t like to be reminded that the police will “kick your ass and get away with it.”
  • Lazarides’ latest show in LA is Eurotrash with Vhils, Micallef and JR. Hi-Fructose has pictures.
  • Alison Young’s book Street Studio had a launch party in Melbourne.
  • High Roller Society has a massive group print show on right now. I stopped by on Saturday. If you like affordable prints and drawings, check this one out.
  • Daily Mail reports that Banksy has painted some pub in Primrose Hill. Reality: It’s a PR stunt by the pub’s owner, but at least now they have some artwork on their walls.
  • The New Grand Tour, a group show including Jose Parla, Rey Parla and Rostarr, is open now at Bryce Wolkowitz in New York City.
  • Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman, former gallery directors at Deitch Projects, have started up their own gallery in NYC called Hole. I’m not exactly sure how much street art or graffiti you’ll be able to find at the Hole when it opens later this month, but they sent me a press release, so presumably they haven’t ditched street art entirely. The Wall Street Journal has more.
  • Hrag Vartanian has started an interesting discussion on Hyperallergic about a new piece by Mark Jenkins which could easily be mistaken for trash. And by the way, if you don’t already read Hyperallergic, you should start. It’s perhaps my favorite art blog at the moment.
  • Armsrock has a solo show on right now at Signal Gallery. I’m going to check it out tomorrow, but based on the photos on Arrested Motion, I couldn’t be more excited. Armsrock is massively talented and just keeps getting better.

Armsrock – Drawn Towards the Present

Yes. Armsrock has a solo show coming up in London. This is going to be fantastic. Except, for some reason, it sometimes feels like I’m alone in thinking that Armsrock’s work is brilliant. Hopefully this upcoming solo show will change some people’s opinions. Drawn Towards the Present opens at Signal Gallery on June 3rd.

Here’s the press release:

The Danish artist Armsrock, is one of a handful of artists on the Urban/Street art scene whose work reaches out beyond the confines of the genre. The quality and unique nature of his work, both on the street and for the gallery, has made him stand out in that talented crowd.

Armsrock’s work consists of delicately drawn figures, which he pastes on walls in urban settings. Mostly life-size portraits of humans on the edge of society, the character and placement of these pieces make them feel, sometimes, as if they have been tattooed to the wall. At other times, they can appear transitory – as if they had just arrived at a scene and are about to move on. More recently, he has developed an analogue projection technique that enables him to combine his magical drawn figures with light. This has the effect of making the images even more fragile and fleeting, almost like ghosts.

His new show in Signal Gallery is called ‘Drawn Towards The Present’. The show will be built around an installation that will consist of monumental charcoal drawings on rice paper. The imagery represented in the drawings is based on press-clippings from the artist’s archive, which have been reworked to create a fragmentary representation of contemporary history and a glimpse into our future hopes and fears.

Armsrock, was born in 1984 in Copenhagen and graduated at the Hochschule Für Kunst in Bremen, Germany. The quality of his art has been recognised internationally and has been seen in streets and public spaces across Europe and the United States. He has also shown his work extensively in traditional art institutions, such as museums and galleries. This is a young artist whose passion and commitment to his craft has won him supporters and buyers wherever he has shown his work.

Unfortunately, I’m going to be in Italy when this show opens, but I expect it’s going to be quite something to see. And make sure to get down to the gallery quickly, because the show only lasts from June 3rd until the 19th.

New light works from Armsrock

Armsrock has been working on projected street art for some time now, but I think these are his best light works yet. They’re ghostly, but naturally they’re more like forgotten ghosts wandering the city than horror-film ghouls.

Armsrock says: “I have just spend the last couple of days in Lueneburg in Germany doing experiments with two light technicians there, trying out different ways of combining drawing with time based media. Here is some of the things that came out of it. Analogue projections on site in Lueneburg. The original drawings for the dia-slides are about the size of the surface of a hand.”