The visual artist INSA lays down a stack with his latest exhibit “Dirty Cash.” Set in London’s Flawless Gallery “Dirty Cash” is an ode to INSA’s raunchy style of artwork. With vulumptuos curves, dripping paint and roots in the art of graffiti INSA places himself in a category all his own. The exhibit will be open through the month of July. For more information click here.
SaLon at WHITEBOX is a testament to the diversity of the UK’s freshest emerging talent. Eight recent graduates of British art schools like the Royal Academy of Art or Goldsmiths were selected to represent what SaLon considers the new wave of British art.
From spraypaint to embroidery, each artist creates a solid impression on the audience despite the collective nature of the exhibit. Although hailed as a the new generation of British art, the artists make it clear that they are more than just a unit, breaking the need for cohesion in the exhibit and favoring screaming voices of independence and change. The ways in which they voraciously attack modern British life only serves to emphasize the frustrations with the lack of societal progression.
Among the illustrious eight is explosive new talent Sarah Maple. Hailed as the new Tracey Emin by The Independent on Sunday, she was recently awarded the “4 Sensations Award” for her controversial work. Maple addresses questions of Islamic identity by placing stereotyped versions of veiled women within a Westernized fashion photography context. Various references to Kate Moss are explicitly made, if only to contrast the liberalism of the Westernized woman with that of the modesty of the Islamic woman. Her artwork is suffused with questions on religious and national identity because of her mixed religious and cultural upbringing.
Attempting to blur the lines between fashion, art and architecture, Mobile Art is jumping head first into the avant-garde. The brainchild of Chanel’s creative director Karl Lagerfeld and architect wunderkind Zaha Hadid, the concept of a traveling gallery is a means of subverting the traditional ways in which people visit galleries, transporting the art to the people, and not the other way around. The gallery, which inhabited Hong Kong from February to April, is now closing it’s Tokyo run. Soon, it will reopen in New York, then continuing through London, Moscow and Paris.
A physical synonym of ultra-modern, the gallery itself (pictured above) is a white, streamlined loop-shaped structure, with industrial undertones. Visitors exit from the starting point of their journey, replicating the cyclical, and oftentimes fickle, nature of fashion.
The exhibit is a showcase of individual installations, all the work of twenty handpicked international artists. And whilst the gallery itself is arguably the most striking piece on display, the inspiration of the Chanel quilted handbag stirred in the artists’ some strikingly conceptual pieces, most notably “At the Bottom” by Japanese artist Tabaimo, an elevated structure in which visitors peer down into a well filled with the floating dreams of Chanel customers.
Perfectly capturing the international aesthetic of the Chanel brand, Mobile Art will be touring the world’s major cities, starting off in futuristic Tokyo and culminating in the capital of Haute Couture, Paris.
Leaving an imprint on New York’s indie fashion circles for the past few years with experimental, expressive collections, young NYC-based designer Brian Wood sees his latest African Warlord line culminating with the drop of his upcoming Africa Vintage Logo limited edition tee.
Known for artistic pieces suited for the streets and runways alike, Brian Wood’s designs are a product of creative vision and the tutelage of visionaries like Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui. The African Warlord concept was an examination of the impact Western popular culture has had on continental African sensibilities. Ripe with color and content, each piece spoke to the collision of two world cultures.
With the Africa Vintage Logo tee, Brian Wood presents his most artfully crafted piece in the collection thus far. The cut and sew tee features 6 printed iconic vintage logos, with a 4 panel-pieced front, and raw edge sleeve finish. The back neck label is also stitched on an appliquéd square of authentic Khenti cloth. Limited to only 100 total pieces produced, the Africa Vintage Logo tee will surely be a rare delicacy among the boutique circuit.
Be on the lookout for a July 1st drop, and check here for a current listing of shops where you’ll be able to invest in this work of textile art.
Here’s one for all you DIY photogs, lomos and designers out there: the Lomographic Society International is partnering with the tee-shirt company Threadless on a contest to design some gear inspired by Lomo’s 10 Golden Rules of Photography.
Rule 1: Take your camera everywhere you go
Rule 2: Use it any time — day or night
Rule 3: Lomography is not an interference in your life but part of it
Rule 4: Try the shot from the hip
Rule 5: Approach the objects of your lomographic desire as close as possible
Rule 6: Don’t think
Rule 7: Be fast
Rule 8: You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film
Rule 9: Afterwards either
Rule 10: Don’t worry about any rules
Known for supplying the recent resurgence in plastic, “toy” cameras like the Diana, the Holga and the Lomo — cheap-bodied, high-saturated, medium-format relics of the American 50s to 70s, Soviet Russia and good Commuists worldwide — the Lomographic Society was founded in Vienna in the early 90s by a couple of guys who accidentally rediscovered the magic aesthetic of these cameras. The society’s guerrilla style and rules of irreverence quickly outgrowing its supply, Lomo expanded to Berlin a few years later and held simultaneous inaugural exhibitions in New York and Moscow.
Watch out of your design wins! Besides the 2,000 Dollars in prize cash, you could also gain a heap of Lomo camera tricks. With those in your pocket, you’ll soon find yourself in a vast global network of street photogs and creatives who will nod knowingly every time you snap off a little plastic shot.
More on Lomographic here and on the contest here.
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Blu may be one of my favorite street artists working today. His work, as instantly identifiable by style as it is by sheer scale, has also been humming a high current through the world art net recently, culminatingin an invitation to do a piece on the side of the Tate Modern in London and a solo show at the Galleria Patricia Armocida in Milan, which opened last week.
Like a global graphic novel, Blu’s tenuously allegorical grotesques and often mythological figures appear on building-sized panels dispersed from Saõ Paulo to Berlin and from Nigeria to Palestine. There isn’t a narrative that binds them to be “read” together — at least not one I see — but each sketch is also a skit, a scene acted out in the borderlands of comedy and drama. A little bit of surreal life sliced out of a dreaming child’s acidic nightmare by a sure, clever surgeon.
The life that Blu gives his creations is what sets him apart most and nowhere is that life more evident than in the epic stop-animation above that he made last winter.
More Blu here.
Galleria Patricia Amocida
via Bazzini n°17, Milano
The mercury retrograde is over and a fresh breeze of regeneration will be felt by all this Saturday, June 21 with the Avant Yard offering of “Ancient Futures: The DNA of Culture and Civilizations” at MoCADA, the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts at 5pm.
This multi-media group exhibition will confront socio-political boundaries in “underground” movements with a dynamic blend of painting, photography, installation art, photo-illustration, and music. Featured artists include, Terry Boddie, Fikisha C., Jennifer Crute, Francks Deceus, Joshua Humphries, Dirk Joseph, Laura James, Kip Omolade, William Rhodes, Danny Simmons, Jamel Shabazz, and Malik Yusef Cumbo (Avant Yard).
Live music will be presented by The Essential M.C. (CA), Game Rebellion (NY), The Welfare Poets (NY), Yolanda Zama (SA), Nucomme (TX), and a long awaited Survival Soundz reunion featuring Carla Csharp Gomez (ATL).
Known for giving young artists the stage to speak their voice, Avant Yard will set the day in bloom with a special photographic collaboration from the students of Life Academy High School for Film and Music from 2pm until 5pm.
An opening reception hosted by Defrei of Ahficianados with resident DJ’s, The Majestic Twinsound and Ahficial Music continues on to the main exhibition from 5pm until 9pm, including a dance from LOVESPACE MUSIC Alter-Native Movement.
MoCADA is located at 80 Hanson Place in Ft. Greene.
The entire event is FREE.
“Ancient Futures: The DNA of Culture and Civilization” will be on view at MoCADA through September 7th, 2008.
For more info, click here
What do you get when you cross a French filmmaker and a closet jammed with shoes and books? The neat freaks and green-thinking among us, relax- for Mr. Brainwash, better known as MBW, it is only fodder for his art.
MBW has spent the last nine years attempting to make the ultimate documentary about graffiti art. While filming, MBW began putting his camera aside and making art of his own, displaying a Banksy-esque predilection for coloring on the walls. Graduating from a few hand drawn stickers to giant billboard sized paste-ups, MBW has become one of the most prolific street artists in California.
MBW’s first exhibition, “Life is Beautiful,” opens in Los Angeles this week, running four days in a former Hollywood studio complex. The exhibit features more than 300 paintings, sculptures and prints, alongside installations made from 100,000 of the aforementioned shoes and a life-size recreation of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” MBW also does his own take on graffiti, Andy Warhol and icons of American pop culture- neither Marilyn Manson, Michael Jackson nor anyone in-between, are spared his aerosol treatment.
For more information on Mr. Brainwash’s show, click here
Also, be sure to check out the opening reception, Wednesday, June 18, 7P-11P: the first 200 people walk away with a hand finished limited edition print by MBW himself.
Life is Beautiful
June 19 - 22
CBS Studios
6121 Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
“Tr: To Drink and To Penetrate Jubilantly,” Jean Faucheur
Every time I turn a corner into a bookstore, at least a dozen new graffiti books threaten my faith in this form. Ostensibly “art books,” these publications simply flood shelves with terrible photographs of mediocre wheatpaper posters and wall-scrawls as empty as the cans that were wasted on them. Art book? No — and it undercuts the value of graffitti to give these paperweights that pretense.
Then there are the gems, few and far between. Graffiti Paris, available this month from Abrams, is not exactly a gem, however. It suffers from the kind of documentary, head-on photography that leaves the graphic in the frame but little else, decontextualizing the work from the neighborhood that produced it. Especially in Paris, where geography permeates identity, that context is key.
But Graffiti Paris is still one of the better books out there. Paris is full of strong, living, fighting and politicized graffiti and Fabienne Grévy, the art historian and photographer who created Graffiti Paris, has a great eye for picking the quality pieces off a wall overrun by quantity.
As Grévy notes in the introduction, Graffiti Paris includes photographs taken over the last 15 years. The project’s priority was to preserve a record of Paris street art from the 1990s and late-80s, street art that will soon be worn away. In other words, the point here was never to make an “art book” exactly and, as a record of some of the best graffiti to grace The City of Lights in the past decade, Graffiti Paris is really rather good!