Month: March 2009

This is the first video installment from rapper and graphic artist Bisc1’s multimedia album The Strange Love Project. Bisc, a native of Massachusetts by way of Connecticut, moved to NYC 10 years ago and quickly made a name for himself in music and graffiti circles. For The Strange Love Project, Bisc joined forces with twenty visual artists and ten producers to reinterpret his 2008 album When Electric Night Falls. The video was shot, directed, and produced by Carl Weston, who you may be familiar with. Weston has been a producer of graffiti videos for over two decades and is the co-founder of Video Graf Productions. In this video, Weston follows Bisc, equipped with an arsenal of supplies, as he leaves lasting impressions on the dark abandoned streets and alleyways of lower Manhattan.

Carl Weston Video

Shepard Fairey x Glen E Friedman x Bad Brains

Bad Brains are one of my favorite punk/hardcore groups of all time. If you don’t have their self titled debut, “Rock For Light”, “I Agaist I”, or “Quickness”, they are all essential. I first heard Bad Brains at the beginning of 1984 when my friend lent me the brilliantly curated and titled Alternative Tentacles compilation “Let Then Eat Jellybeans”(A Reagan dessert favorite update to the Marie Antoinette slogan “Let them eat cake”). The Bad Brains song “Pay to Cum” from their first album was on the comp along with songs by Black Flag, The Dead Kennedys, The Circle Jerks, Flipper, etc.. I then went out to find full length records by all those bands. I soon discovered Minor Threat as well, and learned that Bad Brains had influenced their vocalist Ian MacKaye and Black flag vocalist Henry Rollins who were from Washington DC where Bad Brains had started as well. The Bad Brains were also a huge influence for the Beastie Boys. This collaboration ties into almost all of the bands I mentioned because they were almost all iconically shot at various times by photographer Glen E. Friedman. Glen shot a lot of great photos of Bad Brains and a few different shots were spliced together as the reference for this poster illustration. If you don’t know Glen’s work, and you should… go to burningflags.com. This poster is signed by Glen, me, and all the original members of Bad Brains. Keep that PMA.
-Shepard

Bad Brains Collaboration Print
Shepard Fairey x Glen E Friedman x Bad Brains
24 x 18, 3 Color Screen Print
Edition of 425
Signed by Shepard, Glen E Friedman, and all the original members of Bad Brains
$120

ON SALE 3/26/09

Obey

Clare Rojas:
San Francisco painter, singer, and filmmaker Clare E.Rojas is not a folk artist. In Clare Rojas’ works, women, men, nature and animals are strong and weak caring and connected to one another in their struggle to find harmony and balance. She celebrates women for their traditional and most basic differences and strengths. While the characters are often imbued with feelings of loss and nostalgia, one gets the sense that they will not back down. They will ultimately beat their predators at their own game.

Rojas’s appropriation of folk imagery addresses contemporary female social concerns “The feeling of loss in my work, is my feeling of loss of hope. The struggle to find the good and the beautiful and represent it is my challenge. Understanding the ugliness that finds its way into our culture is crucial.” Rojas’s beautiful uses of allegory and of an imagined cultural landscape in her paintings act to subvert our current accepted perceptions of women. It allows the spectator an engagement with an alternate evocative world that is both funny and sad and that points to the complexities of being a resilient female in the twenty-first century. Rojas often depicts women alone, standing amid a flattened forest landscape, but this is not to suggest that they are lonely. No, Rojas’s women exist in their own reality, feeling peaceful, protected, and quiet.

Selected exhibitions include a group exhibition with the Luggage Store, San Francisco in 2003 for which she won a Louis Comfort Tiffany award. In 2004 Rojas had a solo show at the San Francisco Art Institute and at the Belkin Satellite Gallery in Vancouver. Her work was included in the travelling exhibition, Beautiful Losers. She has exhibited at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and was most recently a featured artist at the Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial.

*Partial Text Credit to : Dietch Projects, and Katie Geha Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Andrew Jeffrey Wright:
Andrew Jeffrey Wright is a current and founding member of Philadelphia’s Space 1026 art commune. He has a BFA in Animation. The collaborative animation “the manipulators”, which he made with Clare E. Rojas, has won the top prize for animation at the New York Underground Film Festival and the New York Comedy Film Festival. Wright’s highly limited edition handmade books have gained an international following. His works include painting, animation, drawing, collage, photography, sculpture, video, installation, screen printing and performance. He has shown at Lizabeth Oliveria(LA), New Image Art(LA), Spector(Philadelphia), The Luggage Store(San Francisco), Lump(Raliegh), The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts(Philadelphia), ICA(Philadelphia), Giant Robot NY(NYC) The Corcoran(DC) and Foundation Cartier(Paris). He has shown with Barry McGee, Paper Rad, Leif Goldberg, Clare E. Rojas, Marcel Dzama and Michael Dumontier.

New Image Art Gallery

New book, 25 years later…

Graffiti Galleriet

Fuse Gallery NYC

“Wart Exhibit,” a solo exhibition by Houston-based artist Mark Flood, will include mixed media drawings, paintings, sculpture and installation.

Flood has been making and showing artwork for 30 years and has worn many different hats along the way: punk rocker, corporate lackey, author, identity illusionist. His work introduces the idea of a defeatist hermeticism: total, and yet not reassuring. A search-and-deface tactic serves the artist’s needs; collected Hurricane Ike debris, glossy celebrity posters, road signs and bolts of chintzy lace are transformed to cut a swath through the usual. This would seem to be the point of artwork at large.

But, in Mark’s case, the swath is not born from the withdrawn nobility of stereotypical studio practice. Instead the self-described “multi cellular invertebrate recently discovered under the slimy rock of obscurity” exists squat in the mix, if only to adjust it. Even beauty is re-mapped to become, as Flood says, “the sort that bypasses art bureaucrats, would-be authoritarians and the gut-shielding, gate-keeping functions of the human mind.” The surface of a text panel or lace painting still holds all the irregularities and shiny moments prone to seduction: if one is seduced by important words misspelled, does it still count? In the artist’s words, “Using the finest retail display technology, Wart Exhibit assembles a sampling of these problematic exercises into a walk-thru experience for casual viewing.” This is the first solo exhibition by Mark Flood in Berlin.

“Like A Turkey Thru Corn” is Bradley’s third solo exhibition at Peres Projects and his first at the new Culver City gallery location in Los Angeles.

Until recently Bradley has been known primarily for his minimal, rectilinear “figures” composed of monochrome panels. The paintings presented here, however, continue the artist’s beloved and maligned new Schmagoo series, first presented in New York last fall. A somewhat ridiculous word, “Schmagoo” originates from the Beat-era street slang for heroin. It is this wry semiotic pairing that compels the artist to take a primitive approach:

“The word stuck with me, and I began to think of “Schmagoo” as short hand for some sort of Cosmic Substance… Primordial Muck. The stuff that gave birth to everything∑I have been thinking of Painting as a metaphor for the original creative act.” (JB, 2008)

Bradley drafts many versions of each gesture before hitting the finished note on raw canvas, as if to imply that automatic writing can be made repetitive (picture a grade school notebook cover) and, as such, eventually reveals potent mutations: slang for heroine (Super Schmagoo), a faceless mouth, the Jesus fish who swims downstream. Perhaps as Jungian children, we’ve been inbred by appropriation and pop overexposure. Bradley titles the show after late Houston blues legend Lightnin’ Hopkins’ 1959 tune of a similar name. Hopkins sings about fleeing through the corn fields like a turkey in pajamas: “Just had to get away from there!” Bradley’s work shares this kind of endearing resolution of a fix.

Peres Projects

GALERIE GRITA INSAM

This exhibition serves to focus on the recent artistic output by three underground heroes from the worlds of skateboarding, graffiti and punk. Even though each of these artists has now firmly established themselves in the world of contemporary art, there are still common themes between them that hail back to their subcultural roots. It could be described primarily as an overriding sense of concern for and representation of the downtrodden, the outsider, the anti-hero. McGee’s sad, sullen faces and neon-colored geometric panels reflect the archetypal image of man overpowered by omnipresent media, Templeton’s portraits of suburban youths perfectly illustrate the harsh alienation of teenage life, while Pettibon’s drawings and paintings focus sharply on issues of personal/social unrest, life during war and the constant power struggle between a man and his destiny. The fact that this is the first time an exhibition has featured all three artists in such direct proximity to each other will be an interesting statement not only on each artists’ individual style, but also the unique similarities that run through all of their works.

 

Barry McGee (1968-) comes from a background of creating unsanctioned work on city streets in his native San Francisco. Originally signing his works with the tag “Twist”, the artist draws his force and inspiration from the contrast and tension that exists between the city center and the suburbs, between wealthy districts and the slums. McGee’s signature tags and markings have inserted an element of the individual and the handmade into a depersonalized urban landscape that has become increasingly crowded with corporate logos, trademarks and advertisements. McGee’s complex installations convey a sense of vitality and chaos, juxtaposed with a precarious nature and sense of alienation. Large-scale wall murals, clusters of small, framed drawings and snapshots, various tools and other street detritus make their way into his installations in an almost symphonic fashion. McGee has exhibited his works internationally including Deitch Projects, New York, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Foundation Cartier, Paris, and Fondazione Prada, Milan. McGee currently lives and works in San Francisco, California.

 

Ed Templeton (1972-) was born in Orange County, California. He grew up in Anaheim, then his family moved to a trailer park in Corona. His father ran off with his babysitter. He eventually moved to Huntington Beach and began skateboarding when he was 13. By the time he was 18 I had started skateboarding professionally and left high school to enter skate contests in Europe. Upon his return he started painting and taking photographs. In 1994 he had his first solo exhibition at Alleged Gallery in New York. Since then he has exhibited his work internationally including exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Kunsthalle, Vienna, ICA Philadelphia, Modern Art, London and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles. His first hardcover monograph, Deformer, was published in 2008 by Italian publisher Damiani. To this day Templeton still skates professionally and runs a skateboard company, Toy Machine. He lives and works in Huntington Beach, California with his wife Deanna and their cat Ptah.

 

Raymond Pettibon (1957-) was born in Tucson, Arizona. The fourth of five children, Pettibon earned a degree in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles. After graduating from college, Pettibon worked briefly as a high-school math teacher, but soon after set out to launch a career as a professional artist. A cult figure among underground music devotees for his early work associated with the Los Angeles punk rock scene, Pettibon has acquired an international reputation as one of the foremost contemporary American artists working with drawing, text, and artist’s books. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2002, an exhibition of his drawings, Plots Laid Thick, was organized by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain, and traveled to the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, and the Haags Gemeentemuseum in the Netherlands. Pettibon’s work was also featured at Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany. Pettibon lives and works in Venice Beach, California. (All works by Raymond Pettibon are shown by courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin und Regen Projects Los Angeles.)

CIRCLECULTURE GALLERY

  

New piece from Soe the man:::….
Dozo

Todd Schorr
The World We Live In

Merry Karnowsky Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of new works by renowned American artist Todd Schorr. One of the most prominent pop surrealist painters working today, Schorr uses the exacting techniques of the old masters to paint colorful cartoon characters, corporate mascots and other pop culture icons in a unique style he calls “cartoon realism.”

The Opening Reception on March 28 will be hosted by actor David Arquette, and a portion of the evening’s sales will go to Feeding America, the nation’s leading domestic hunger-relief charity.

Schorr’s work is highly influenced by the popular culture of his childhood: post-war 1950’s America. His formative years were spent watching countless horror, sci-fi, war, cartoon, cowboy, and puppet shows on a black-and-white TV set, building styrene plastic models, reading comic books, and leafing through his parents’ National Geographic magazines.

The compulsion to replicate the characters he saw in cartoons, commercials, comic books and magazines led to a formal education at The Philadelphia College of Art. Schorr began his career as an illustrator in New York City, which exposed him to a new set of influences from the world of advertising and commercial art. Though his career as an illustrator was successful (his work appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1982), Schorr soon left the commercial world and began expressing his ideas on canvas.

Schorr says: “Like any artist of worth, it took many long years of struggle and investigative thought along with trial and error as well as constant honing of technique to reach the point where I felt I had created a language which, when spoken well, would command some semblance of purpose. I work in what is best described as a surreal style but filtered through the mind and eyes of what is, for better or worse, uniquely American.”

In 2008 Schorr’s work was shown at the Laguna Art Museum as part of “In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz School,” and a solo retrospective exhibition will be held at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2009.

Schorr’s work has been featured in Juxtapoz, Dangerous Ink, and in the documentary film, The Treasures of Long Gone John. Schorr’s most recent monograph is Dreamland, 2004, published by Last Gasp Press. His new book, American Surreal will be released in 2009. Schorr currently resides with his artist-wife Kathy in Los Angeles, CA.

MK Gallery