2009
11.25
11.25
2009
11.25
11.25
Our Norwegian readers may already be aware of the controversy surrounding Nuart’s placement of works in the city centre. National Radio, TV and Print media have all recently covered the case, and we’re happy to say that the response has been nothing but positive. The case was brought by Stavanger Sentrum Ltd, a private company whose mandate is to.. well.. we don’t actually know. To keep the city “Tidy” and tag free, to increase property values by maintaining a wooden “Toy town”, to increase consumer spending ? what we do know, is that hiding behind the excuse of protecting Stavanger’s “Cultural Heritage” doesn’t cut it. There are some excellent. professional and vastly more experienced council organisations that exist for this sole purpose. Organisations that we have always had an open dialogue with. Unfortunately STAS a/s don’t seem to like dialogue, instead, they conduct their “Zero Tolerance” complaints through the media and fail to present any evidence at all over the claim that Nuart’s presence downtown increase tagging.
Looking at the comments sections of the media articles, it seems their strategy has somewhat backfired.
Feel free to read the articles or join the debate on the links below. You may even see yours truly on TV.. yikes !
2009
11.24
11.24
Stencil artist Logan Hicks completed his largest stencil to date today on the streets of Brooklyn. Then he posed for a few photos and ran off to his next art gig.
Curated by Brooklyn Street Art for Espeis Outside, this mural is a hot blast of Logan Red to take us through the impending winter holidays and into the new year. Not that the burly plain-talking-force-of-nature stencil master has any plans for 2010.
Unless you count the shows he’s scheduled to do in Hong Kong, Paris, Gambia, London, Rome, Vienna, Miami and of course The People’s Republic of Brooklyn (at the Opera Gallery).
Check out the insightful interview with Logan on the link below.
Text and Video from those nice chaps and Nuart partners in crime at Brooklynstreetart
2009
11.20
11.20
Some interesting pieces popping up on the streets of Tehran, showing streetart and graffiti is a truly international affair.
More info here
2009
11.19
11.19
RJ, he of Vandalog fame, opens the much talked about “The Thousands” show tonight. We had the pleasure of hooking up with Rj earlier this year in sunny Stavanger as he made the trip over for Nuart. Really looking forward to seeing the show, RJ, as some of you are aware, is a very youthful 18 years of age. Though going by the professionalism of this show, the promotion behind it and the dedication to his blog, Vandalog, I’m beginning to think he has something of the Benjamin Button about him and really, he’s closer to being 50.
More on the show here
Interview with RJ from Open Magazine
The Thousands
12th November 2009, Rebecca Laing
Next week sees the opening of The Thousands, London’s latest pop-up art exhibition. Curated by 18 year-old RJ Rushmore it brings together some of street art’s biggest names for a fleeting five day visit. We had a chat with him about the show, his age and why he thinks Mr Brainwash is over-rated.
So what makes this exhibition different to any of the others cropping up across the country at the moment? Maybe it’s the unconventional ethos; most of the artwork on display is not for sale as the aim of the event isn’t to sell the work, it’s to publicise it and raise awareness of the talent to be found within the street art scene. Or perhaps it’s the fact that the curator is a mere 18 years-old. One thing’s for sure, with some of the most formidable names in the business (Banksy, Faile, Nick Walker, Shepard Fairey and Blek Le Rat to name a few) involved, The Thousands is certainly pricking up the ears of those in the know.
We caught up with curator RJ during a break in his busy schedule.
What is The Thousands?
A street art exhibition curated and organised by myself. It’s also a book launch for my book ‘The Thousands: Painting Outside, Breaking In.’ The exhibition came first, but doing a book just seemed like a logical extension of the project.
Tell us about the exhibition.
The show is about bringing together some of the world’s best street art by some of the world’s best artists. Because most of the work is on loan from private collections, I don’t have to worry about trying to sell out the show, and I have access to great art that people truly love and want to show off, not the pieces that they want to discard from their collections in order to buy better work or a new car.
Some of the artists, like Armsrock and Chris Stain, helped me decide what to include in the exhibition, but other artists told me to go ahead and do whatever I wanted and let them know how it all turns out. Most of the work comes from private collections, but there will be a few brand new pieces.
The most involved artists have been Burning Candy (BC). All nine members of BC are helping to paint a huge mural on the outside wall of the show, and just about everybody in the crew has also decided to put painting inside as well.
What urged you to get so involved within the art scene at such a young age?
My dad started collecting street art and we became interested in it together. I enjoyed going to openings and being able to discover new pieces of art just by taking a wrong turn down a dark alleyway, so I did everything I could to meet people and get more involved with the scene. Blogging seemed like the natural thing to do because I was already spending hours each day reading about street art online, and I’m a computer geek at heart (RJ runs Vandalog, a successful street art blog).
Did you find your age was a hindrance when organising the exhibition?
I think at this point I’m expected to make up some PR-friendly story, but frankly I’m in a fortunate position financially and wanted to do something cool. So in that sense, I could find the money to put on an exhibition and that’s the first step sorted.
Of course, even with the funding, organising an exhibition of this magnitude isn’t a simple matter, and I thought that it would be made much more challenging by my age. But most people have embraced it and it’s become an advantage. There are some collectors involved who don’t often loan work to exhibitions. You might think that they would be less inclined to loan their prized artwork to a teenager, but as it turns out, I think my age has made people more excited to be involved.
For the artists who are directly involved I imagine it has been a bit weird taking orders from somebody the same age as their child (I definitely find it weird), but so far it’s worked out fine.
Who do you rate within the street art scene at the moment and why?
I probably could have gotten in touch with a spray paint company and sorted out some amazing artists to fly out to London and paint the outside wall of The Thousands for free, but instead I’ve decided to stay local and buy all the paint for BC to paint the wall. BC are the forerunners of the London street art scene for their great characters, ability to hit the best walls and collaborative style.
Internationally, Blu, Know Hope and Roa are all rising stars. Know Hope is probably the artist whose work most consistently moves me. I’m pretty sure that if I filled a room with his artwork, I would burst into tears every time I stepped through the doorway. Roa is a Belgian artist who paints these amazing black and white animals. He recently visited London, so if you spot a giant animal spray-painted on or near Brick Lane, that’s Roa. And Blu is one of the most underrated street artists. Almost anyone who sees his massive street pieces think will that his surreal drawings are genius, and his animations like Muto and Combo are internet sensations, but because Blu doesn’t do much commercial work for galleries, he doesn’t have anybody fighting to make his name huge.
Who do you feel is over-rated and why?
My political answer is Banksy. Don’t get me wrong, Banksy may be the greatest artist of the 21st century, but he’s also the only street artist that anybody knows. Any graffiti writer or street artist will tell you that people come up to them on a regular basis to ask if they are Banksy.
My less political answer (though still probably not very controversial) is Mr.Brainwash (MBW). He’s absolute rubbish and I’m tempted to picket outside his upcoming London solo show so that people don’t forget it! He managed to get a bunch of celebrities to his solo show in LA and sold everything on the basis of the hype surrounding him. He even “designed” Madonna’s most recent album cover. Everything MBW tries to sell as art is epically clichéd and of poor quality. Nobody should want these things on their wall, and yet Carson Daily called him the most recognizable street artist in the world. At first, some people thought this had something to do with Banksy; either MBW was Banksy trying to make it as an artist again from the ground up, or MBW was a false persona created by Banksy to play a massive joke on the art world about how hype can make anything popular, no matter how terrible it is, but now it’s pretty clear that MBW is a real person who thinks he is an artist.
What are your plans for the future?
I have no idea. More street art things I hope. I may curate another, much smaller and more commercial, exhibition before heading to Philadelphia next fall for university. At some point, I would like to bring a version of The Thousands into a museum.
The Thousands: November 18th – 22nd, Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, London, EC21 3PQ
Opening Times
18th: 6pm – 10pm
19th: 11am – 9pm
20th: 11am – 5pm
21st & 22nd: 11am – 7pm
2009
11.18
11.18
Nuart09 artist SWOON opens a new show this week at Anonymous Gallery. NYC.
Preview Nov 20 6-9pm
As the 53rd Venice Biennale enters its last days and the world’s art community reflects, Anonymous Gallery, curator Spy Emerson and the artist Swoon provide a glimpse of what critic Jerry Saltz called “…The most moving moment I had at the Biennale…”
Pankabestia: Punk Beasts of the Swimming Cities of Serenissima, is a retrospective of artist Swoon’s “Swimming Cities of Serenissima”, the artist’s recent invasion of the Venice Biennale. Traveling from the Karst region of Slovenia to Venice, Italy, Swoon and more than 30 other artists braved the waters of the Adriatic Sea and navigated a fleet of three intricately hand crafted vessels. The exhibition, curated by Spy Emerson, opens on November 20, 2009 and will include large-scale wall drawings, original Swimming Cities boat installations, portions of the ships, found objects acquired from sea. The exhibition will also feature performers Gatto Morto, Adina Kennedy and Adina Bier, beautiful photographic documentation from artist Tod Seelie, and original artwork from Swoon, Spy Emerson, Monica Canilao, plus many more.
Curator Spy Emerson’s thoughts on the experience:
“Pankabestia”- what the Italian villagers called us when we floated into town on our junk rafts. It translates to “punk beasts”, and by all accounts we were – magical, grubby, unruly creatures carrying out an enchanted mythical scene, looking like bits of broken dreams, drifting.
The townspeople were apprehensive along the rural canals to Venice. They locked their doors and windows when we stopped in town, and they watched. The beauty of the rafts was captivating, the poetic pilings and forced perspectives, stairs spiraling upward, and tiny pagodas with corrugated reflections. The brave came to look… then the curious, and before long all people were welcoming us with gifts and food. In a remote fishing village, a woman told me in broken English, we kissed a breath of life into her old home, and we will not soon be forgotten.
The Swimming Cities of Serenissima was Living Art, designed by SWOON, and executed by 30 individual artists known for their abilities to make unreal things happen. Constructed was a reality without right angles, standard rules did not apply there. Alice, Maria, and Old Hickory were the protagonists of our story, and our traveling homes. Living on the rafts, the crew became a visual part of the large moving sculptures, and participants in the mad drama flourishing in turbulence, primal urges, euphoria and fear.
In retrospect, I see that we were punk beasts. We raided dumpsters, slept on the ground, shat in the woods, and laughed in the rain. We let loose our social restraints to be free to create and experience something profound, to drag our fingertips along the underside of bridges, and jump the fences of the Venice Biennale.”
- spy emerson
curator
Press for Swimming cities of Serenissima:
“…The most moving moment I had at the Biennale, however, came in the last minutes of my last day at the show. Just before closing time, as guards herded stragglers toward the entrance from the far end of the Arsenal where I was, three marvelous-looking vessels cobbled together from urban detritus motored past Mike Boucher’s wonderful sunken suburban house, and into the small lagoon. A band played a haunting song, a woman sang, a girl swung on a swing. The boats are the work of the artist Swoon. I’m told that Swoon wasn’t even invited to the show. She and her gypsy friends simply entered of their own accord and did what they wanted to do. Like the best work here, Swoon’s work doesn’t come out of academic critique; it comes from necessity and vision. These are the perfect tools for making things as old as time new again — including an art world turned dangerously into itself.”
JERRY SALTZ – New York Magazine
Images : Todd Seelie
Original article from WWW.ANONYMOUSGALLERY.COM
2009
11.18
11.18
Our friends over at Brooklynite Gallery NYC have come up with what looks like a terrific show, BG consistently make the effort to create a conceptual framework around their shows, given the financial climate, this one is spot on. The effort gone into some of these works is astonishing. Show opens Nov 21st, if you’re in the area be sure to check it out. BG are renowned for putting on some great opening receptions, Bomb Squad, Kool Herc, Soul Sonic Force & numerous other Numusic friends have all performed on opening nights.
2009
11.13
11.13
I love my home town of Leeds to bits, I really do. But there are reasons I ran away. The above piece of community action against tagging is a good example.
2009
11.12
11.12
