In the era of food trucks, pop-up shops and temporary restaurants, when even underground dance parties are thrown in the bays of parked U-Haul trucks, it’s surprising that more of the art world isn’t getting on board with this wonderfully lo-fi business model that optimizes exposure through social media and the Internet and requires minimal entry costs. Enter Show and Tell, an ambitious foray into the world of the DIY mobile gallery organized by Sierra Stinson, a Seattle-based artist and part-time gallerist, and Victoria Yee Howe, a New York-based conceptual artist and former pastry chef.
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While in Rochester I stopped by the George Eastman House the former home of Kodak film founder George Eastman, and now home to a pretty unique photography museum. The real treasure though, was both unlikely and unexpected. On my I encountered a vintage cigarette machine, cheerily out of time and place. I was delighted to see not tobacco, but art advertised in its tiny little windows.
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City Hall Park is an excellent venue for Sol Lewitt’s sculptures. In the white cube, the problem is that the artist’s three dimensional structures can blend in precariously well with the similarly minimal geometric space, camouflaging their distinctiveness from the viewer. It is good to see Lewitt’s work contrasted with the park’s lush greens and lavish beaux arts architecture. In this context, his works appear like precious and unique islands of understatement.
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I encountered a street work by artist NohJColey in Williamsburg last week. Like all strong street art pieces, it forced me to stop and look closely. The attention to detail, its use of diverse textures and materials and its complex method of storytelling, which is more impressionistic than narrative, made me immediately respond to it, similar to poetry. I stopped to visually measure every inch of the object, a figure with puppet-like arms placed low to the ground in a neglected corner of the city frequented by street artists.
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Last Sunday’s BETA Spaces 2010 didn’t disappoint as we all got what we were looking for. Organized by the all-volunteer organization Arts In Bushwick, BETA Spaces (Bushwick Exhibition Triangle of Alternative Spaces) offered the public a big block party full of art. A truly overwhelming affair with more than 50 exhibitions spread out across galleries, studios, apartments, temporary locations, and any place else that could possibly contain art, it displayed the works of 400 artists in a fantastic collaboration between curators, artists, and art fans of all kind.
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Felice Varini uses nothing but a bit of color, applied to a wall, to shake you from of your routine and, so he hopes, brighten one of memory’s grey spots a little in a moment of world-flattening surreality. In doing so, Varini is not unlike other artists that have sought to place the viewer within the canvas. Like street artist Aakash Nihalani or installation artist Robert Irwinn, Varini is an artist who has moved beyond just using a canvas to orchestrating whole experiences that a viewer can move through.
In a public installation commissioned by New Haven arts nonprofit Site Projects, Varini takes an unremarkable downtown alley in New Haven and stretches an non-intrusive work entitled “Square and Four Circles” (2010) across a few hundred feet of back alley space.
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Writing for Slate, critic Ben David investigates the possibility that Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop may have been a “poisoned valentine” to the global movement known as Street Art.
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Lotus Johnson left this illuminating comment on Alison Young’s post “Art, Value & Banksy’s Rats in Melbourne,” which included an illustration of a stencil depicting a native Australian flower stabbing a Banksy signature animal, the rat. Turns out there’s more than meets the eye.
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There is nothing more universal than nature, but the meaning of what constitutes the term may lead to disagreement. That perceptual ambiguity attracts Gaia, who navigates the boundary between nature and artifice carefully and with apparent ease. His latest artistic mash-up in Baltimore’s Reservoir Hill neighborhood, combines the myths of the Christian saint St. John the Baptist, the Babylonian general Holofernes, and a cock.
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The concept of artistic collaboration is slippery. New York Magazine’s 31st reason to love New York City in 2009 is “Because Our Street Art is Collaborative.” Maybe they don’t really understand the notion of collaboration.
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