Japanese based Haroshi makes sculptures out of recycled skate decks, and they're pretty darn snazzy.
HUF x Haroshi x DLX Collaboration - HUF partners up with Tokyo-based artist Haroshi and Bay Area skateboard distributor DLX on a limited edition collaboration. Shot at artist Haroshi's studio in Tokyo by Shinto God, cut by Martin Reigel. Available January 2012.
Los Angeles based Ian Stoufer (b. 1981) emailed over his newest bronze sculptures Gucci & Lanvin, each editions of 3.
Concepts that informed the project: Pagan idolatry | Virgin sacrifice | Luxury fetishism | Material fulfillment vs. spiritual enlightenment | Religious relics | Proof of God.
Montreal based Ian Langohr creates masks out of ethafoam, fabric, paint, plastic, and rubber - Ian's masks tell stories that contrast themes of melancholy and anxiety with that of absurdity and humour.
A few images from NYC based (via Bay Area) based artist Don Porcella whose woven pipe cleaner sculptures are showing at the non-profit space Art Connects New York through Oct 28th.
Don Porcella is an artist living and working in New York City who utilizes humble materials in innovative ways to craft a unique and humorous commentary on the human condition.
Born and raised in Modesto, California, Don Porcella’s artwork has been exhibited at galleries in New York City, Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen, East Hampton, Washington D.C., Miami and San Francisco. Porcella’s art has been reviewed in the New York Times, NY ARTS, Fiber Arts Magazine, Chelsea Now, San Francisco Magazine and the Village Voice to name a few. He has a BA in Psychology from the University of California at San Diego, a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA from Hunter College in New York. His art is included in some of the world’s best art collections.
Drawing from his own imagery of the suburban and his interest in folk art, cartoons, and science fiction, Porcella's work allows the subjective and strange to penetrate humorous representations of a wildly imaginative reality.
Our friend in Sao Paulo, Flavio Samelo, brings us a sampling of artists/ shows/ music/ etc he's feeling in his native Brazil. This time he introduces us to the work of Rio De Janeiro artist Marcelo Macedo (MACK) whose artistic life began through skateboarding and graffiti. A lot of his sculptural work is created from skateboard pieces, wood found on Rio's many beaches or from late night trash runs... Say hello to Marcelo. -Trippe
Words from Flavio Samelo -- Most of the artists known abroad from the Brazilian street scene come from São Paulo, a massive city with almost 20 million inhabitants. In other large cities around Brazil, far from the watchful eyes abroad, there are a lot of unknown artists that have amazing work, of shocking quality, like Marcelo Macedo a.k.a. MACK from Rio de Janeiro.
Rio is a world famous tourist city, Copacabana, Ipanema, The Christ, etc etc etc. The city is fantastic, with all of its nature, history, and colonial and modern Brazilian architecture mixed together. Their is a large socio-economic gap in Rio, a gap between the rich and the poor, making a lot of young people express themselves via street art.
MACK began painting on the street after his first visit to the skatepark Arpoador Bowl; “We went there to skate one day, and there was a guy called Binho painting inside of the bowl, so we couldn’t skate, but we sat on the curb and watch the guy work. That amused me a lot, and made me start to think about making graffiti!”
His background connects with the nature elements, some religious influence, skateboarding, and street art, making his work really unique. The graffiti pieces depict fish, and other ocean dwelling, along side the names of saints, and phrases that support being calm, and conscious with nature and in everything else.
Got an email from the German anonymous artistic group Luzinterruptus whose projects involve a lot of light work in urban spaces. Their latest below Radioactive Control was created for the Dockville music festival in Hamburg. They tried to demonstrate, in a humorous tone, the paranoia that we are suffering from since the escape of radioactive material in Japan, has brought into question the safety systems at the nuclear power plants.
With our mysterious army of 100 illuminated radioactive figures, which advanced threateningly on the natural environment of the festival, we wanted to invite reflection regarding the use and abuse of nuclear energy, cheap in economic terms, but which can cause grave secondary effects for the environment and health, forever irreversible.
Our friend Tofer (Tofer Chin) was recently in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to take part in the third installment of NOVA at Parque Lage. He emailed some beautioful images of his Fourteen Black, acrylic and wood installations throughout Parque Lage gardens. The Stalagmites are living and breathing souls, ghosts, spirits, voids, shadows. Great works.
Derek Weisberg returns to Anno Domini (San Jose, CA) for his second solo exhibition with a brand new body of ambitious and courageous work. Weisberg continues to examine his own life and the world around him, attempting to answer questions, which have plagued humans since the beginning of time.
Artist Maggie Haas was born and raised in New Hampshire. She moved to San Francisco to attend graduate school at CCA, where she got her MFA in 2010. Maggie recently let me poke around her studio in the Mission, where we chatted about west coast utopian ideals, hardware stores, and quilting. -Interview by Suzanne Stroebe
SS: You play with old and new -- your sculpture and installation pieces are uber contemporary, referencing the likes of Cordy Ryman and Brion Nuda Rosch. Then you jump to a modernized version of fresco (with spackle) and guache and ink paintings, practices that are centuries old. Who are some of your artistic influences?
MH: I'm a huge fan of Northern Renaissance interiors... that moment when painters (and paint) got really good and a little secularized, an artists turned their eyes to world around them. And then, reaching forward in time and backward in sentiment, I've been returning to the work of the Pre-Rapahelites over and over, since I was a child. Their sense of color and omnivorous observation of the natural word led to some really hallucinatory looking work sometimes, and they also marked a period when craft, idiosyncratic handmade functional objects, was being considered and celebrated. I spend a lot of time looking at interior design and home-improvement books and blogs, sometimes gleefully but often with a lot of eye-rolling, too. And Minimalism is something I think about quite a lot, both as an ideal, and as something to be fought with and complicated.
SS: How did you come to sculpture? Color and paint are an important aspect of even your large sculptures and installation work; do you have a background in painting?
MH: There was a clear moment when I was an undergraduate when I realized how much the preparatory drawings for sculptures mattered to my work, the diagrams and blueprints, as it were. More recently blueprints and plans have come to be a real part of the content of my work, too, not just a drawing style.
My work is concerned with the way we build things, especially the way amateur builders build, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about the color palettes of lumber yards (all those 2x4s stained red or blue at the end!) and hardware stores (safety colors, neon colors, the nice periwinkle of the chalk used to snap level lines, grays, purples and greens of different grades of drywall). It's exciting to approach those tools and materials with an eye to pleasure as well as practicality.
Derek Weisberg will be showing new sculptures in San Jose this Friday 2/4 at Gallery A.D.
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Derek Weisberg returns to Anno Domini (San Jose) for his second solo exhibition with a brand new body of ambitious and courageous work. Weisberg continues to examine his own life and the world around him, attempting to answer questions, which have plagued humans since the beginning of time. ~show details.
"and they were all caught in something larger than themselves"
This piece was constructed as a site specific installation for a Cornish alumni exhibition. The title is derived from the book "The Grapes of Wrath." 2007
This November, sculptor Jud Bergeron and painter Joe Sorren will unveil eight new bronze sculptures, created in collaboration, by the two noted artists. The show entitled “Interruption” will be at California State University Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center (GCAC), in Southern California, then will travel to Sorren’s hometown in Northern Arizona.
The exhibition opens at Grand Central Art Center on November 6, 2010 and runs through January 8, 2011, then will be presented by Flagstaff Cultural Partners at the Coconino Center for the Arts, Jan. 22 through Feb. 25, 2011.
We recently had a chance to do a quick interview with Jud Bergeron about the works presented in the show through email.
Blob creatures viewing geometric forms as if in awe of them. Can you explain how those came to be? Which one of you both was responsible for what in the works?
Joe came to my studio in NY 3 times and each time we would just make stuff, sometimes ceramic figures that we would pass back and forth until we liked them, sometimes wax figures that we would cast in bronze, just stuff. Joe would go back to AZ and we would talk everyday and send hundreds of phone pics and the work just sort of evolved. It became a call and response sort of thing, I would think of strange situations to put these figures in and then we would change the idea a hundred times until we hit on what felt right.
Feeling of helplessness or giving over to a higher and cleaner form Sitting back and taking it all in. These characters, how would you describe their milieu?
I would say that the 'higher power/helplessness' feeling you are sensing is probably a function of where we were in our personal lives at the time. When we started working my son (Fletcher) was around 6 months old and I was still coming to terms with being a new father. Also, the country was in shambles and the art market had just taken a nose dive so there was this feeling of 'oh shit! How am I going to support this family?' Joe had things going on in his life as well and we were not only creating art together but it seemed like we were counseling one another as well. I would describe these figures in the most basic sense, they are dealing with their environment. We really wanted these pieces to be truly sculptural in nature yet still maintain the narrative that is so prevalent in painting and in doing so what we ended up with were these environments or situations that these figures inhabited and the goal was to create beautiful pieces that left the viewer with questions and a smile.
Deep in the forest of Parikkala, in the easternmost part of Finland, lies one of the craziest tourist attractions on the face of the planet – the sculpture park of Veijo Rönkkönen.
Regarded by most as the most important ensemble of contemporary folk art in Finland, the sculpture park of Veijo Rönkkönen is a lot to take in, the first time you visit. Finding yourself surrounded by hundreds of creepy statues, grinning at you with their real human teeth, is enough to spook you into turning back as soon as you set foot in the park. ~read on.
Thanks for the email, Tucker. Wish we could see it in person.
Like wearing a watch but don't want to bother with all that pesky technology, Barcelona based artist Axel Brechensbauer has you covered... We also dig this great truck sculpture.
This day may have been inevitable, but now it's finally here. In its attempt to take over the world - or at least everything that can be bought and sold in the world, Amazon is launching an art gallery.
This summer Amazon is planning to launch a Fine Art Gallery where customers will be able to purchase original artwork offered by a select group of invited galleries via Amazon.com. ~continue reading
A new HBO documentary looks at the work of street artist JR, whose giant portraits force people in troubled areas to confront the humanity that's all around them... On the day JR found out he'd won the $100,000 TED Prize, the French pasteup artist found himself in China being questioned by police for doing his thing on the streets of Shanghai. ~continue reading
Street artist JR HBO documentary premiered yesterday, May 20th
Art lovers, collectors and gallerists will gather on Thursday for Hong Kong's inaugural edition of Art Basel, sealing the city's status as an international art hub and Asia's leading art destination... Hong Kong has surged to third place in the global art auction market behind New York and London and Western galleries are falling over each other to open franchises in the former British colony. ~continue reading
Our buddy Ferris Plock opens a small show of drawings at Benny Gold on 3169 16th St this Friday, May 24th (7-10pm) featuring 31 drawings priced at 75-140 bucks.
Ferris also released the video Fingered! he produced with animator Jim Dirschberger. View it
Wowzas, there's a lot of art happenings this weekend, and while you're making the rounds, be sure to stop at SFAI's MFA show Currency opening Friday, May 17th at the beautiful old SF Mint Building (88 5th Street).
SFAI's 2013 MFA graduates—working in painting, photography, printmaking, film, sculpture, installation, digital media, performance, and across media—will present work that embraces the Institute's signature spirit of experimentation and conceptual risk-taking.
Opening reception: Friday, May 17, 7–9 pm & running through Sunday 11-6pm daily. -- complete details
London based Pedro Matos opens the solo show Building Castles Made of Sand this Friday in Los Angeles at the Martha Otero Gallery featuring a new series of oil paintings on canvas and azulejo panels - a traditional Portuguese medium of hand-painted, tin-glazed, ceramic tile work.
TrustoCorp's all new work for their exhibition at LeBasse Projects in Culver City, Los Angeles is a perfect continuum from past work that embraces the bipolar "have/have not" socioeconomic identity of Los Angeles, which they recently established their new studio in.
I didn't know if you came across this video yet, but I ran into my friend Brian Hanson yesterday who helped film and edit it. It's a film short documenting the work and philosophy of Huntington Beach surfboard Shaper Tim Stamps. Super rad and really inspiring! Anyhow take a peek.
Last year, Eric Caruso a teacher at Harry Wirtz Elementary School (Paramount, CA, near LA) had an idea to invite some artists to paint some murals at the school because there wasn't an arts program for the kids. That brilliant idea resulted in some awesome murals by artists Seitaku Aoyama, Yusuke Hanai, Rich Jacobs, Tim Kerr and Albert Reyes.
Ryan De La Hoz' show in the Upper Haight at RVCA runs through this Saturday... And the next time you're in the Mission, be sure to swing through his new shop on 14th St, Cool Try... We need to get over there soon and do a little photo feature for ya.
The Book and Job Gallery (San Francisco) really stepped it up with the opening of Daniel Chen's loveBlast on May 4th. Complete with a doorman, piano player, old fashioneds, and some really nice paintings, I could hardly believe I was at the Book and Job. The paintings varied in size, and the show was balanced nicely between them, the spray-can work on the walls, and the smaller drawings displayed throughout. The kind notes Chen wrote on the walls are certain to brighten your day, and the rest of the work is definitely worth a look. It was a very classy evening and I hope they continue to intersperse shows like these into their schedule in the future
FFDG opened up the group show featuring original works by the artists of the world famous Skull & Sword tattoo last Friday here in San Francisco. Thanks to the huge crowd who turned out to support these four incredibly talented artists. Here is a taste of the show, and be sure to swing in to view in person. The show runs through June 8th.
Gary Baseman's retrospective "The Door is Always Open" at the Skirball in LA opened recently to massive crowds in a huge celebratory opening party. The exhibition is so complex and personal, delving into Baseman's background, family history, and all the layers of prolific work that he has done over the years. After the opening festivities winded down, I caught up with Baseman for an interview. We discussed the underlying meaning to some of the components of the show and how it felt for him, coming from such an honest personal perspective in putting this massive show together.
Fertile Menace, a new show of Mark Mulroney's (NY) work opened at Ever Gold on May 4th and it's not one to be missed. It is intelligently hilarious, with jokes riffing off sex, Foucault, and the body, and while it makes you laugh it's also going to make you think.
Our buddies Jay Howell, Andreas Trolf, and Jim Dirschberger are hyped as their show, which they've been working on for like 2 years, premieres on Nickelodeon Saturday. From the trailers we've seen so far and from what Jay has told us about, the show is going to be pretty epic. Congrats to those radical fellas.
Here's a little taste of work by the artists of the world famous The Skull and Sword tattoo shop who open their show at San Francisco's FFDG on Friday, May 17th (7-10pm).
Following his solo exhibition "The Collected" at Gallery Wendi Norris, painter Amir H. Fallah is in the throes of developing more new works for upcoming international exhibits. We spent some time in his studio in Highland Park, Los Angeles recently, discussing his process and inspiration.
We were first introduced to the photography of Spanish born NYC based Bubi Canal when he emailed us his great video Trust in Me a couple years ago. His solo show Special Moment recently ran at NYC's Munch Gallery in February, and he recently released his newest video Chrystelle below.
Although I missed the opening of Northern-California photographer Michael Garlington's newest show, Constructed Realities, I was fortunate enough to see the work still up during the Metaphysical fundraiser a couple weeks back at 111 Minna. Metaphysical fundraiser, an auction to benefit Wayne Ernzer. --- The ghoulish photographs in their heavy, hand-made frames are reminiscent of photos from the old west, and the glass crucifixes, complete with fetuses and guns, emphasize the accumulated time within the works themselves. Whether you're looking at the frames, the photos, or both, this show deserves a visit, and a walk through the golden archway Garlington constructed around the front door.
Fecal Face contributor Rachel Ralph (rachel(at)fecalface.com) has been profiling this Oakland based painter as he travels about Japan. In this segment, we feature some photos as he prepared for this show and residency at Spes-LaB in Tokyo which opened last weekend. Arnold will be featured in SFMoMA's Minna Street windows on June 8th.
Last Saturday, here in SF's Mission district, Guerrero Gallery opened two new shows with Philly based Alex Lukas and SF based Richard Colman respectively. Colman's work occupied the project space while Lukas' work and foliage was presented in the main space. Worth getting to if you haven't already.
Just got back to SF after a little trip south to Sayulita, Mexico. After 10 years without a vacation, me and the Mrs. headed south for some mental time off sitting in the sun, swimming and enjoying the watery Mexican beer. Here are some photos as we get back into the swing of things again.
Athens, Greece based designer, architect and artist Dimitris Polychroniadis emailed over more of his work which consists of mixed media, pop-humorous diorama sculptures that make a comment on the harsh realities my country and much of the world is facing at the moment.
FFDG will open a group show with the artists from the famed Skull & Sword Tattoo on Friday, May 17th (6-9pm). Artists: Grime, Henry Lewis, Yutaro, and Lango. Below are a series of videos on Grime for Vice's Tattoo Age produced in 2011. Fascinating look at one of the greatest tattoo artists alive today.
ARYZ (Spain) opened his newest gallery show at Fifty24SF last Friday and, if you live in the Bay Area, you need to go. This dude can obviously paint, and he doesn't need an entire building to show his impecable skill. The show has lots of small works on paper which contrast his highly-defined line work to his hard-edged painted objects. The contrast between the hard and soft was the most striking thing to me about his work, since I had never seen it in person before, and the washes blend with the thick paint seamlessly. The show also contains a larger work on canvas, a huge head suspended in the back of the room, and a big wood sculpture of a wolf figure. This diversity in such a small space was impressive, and those of us that went to the opening even got to meet the man in person. If you didn't make it out this weekend, check it out before May 31st when it closes and these works will be off to some very happy new homes.
Water McBeer is please to announce its latest exhibition "Precious" a solo exhibition by David Bayus (April 6 - May 4, 2013) -- David Bayus born 1982 holds his BFA from the Savannah College of Art and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. David lives and works in San Francisco and is a founding member of the basement collective. This will be his first exhibition with the world renown Water McBeer Gallery highlighting his most recent achievements with paint and digital media. David Bayus will be exhibiting 5 relatively large-scale mixed media works along with a collaborative object featuring Hungarian sculptor H.R KOONS.
The Shooting Gallery handed over the reins to the Red Truck Gallery (a New Orleans based gallery) which curated their new show, Hard Time Mini Mall and opened the it on Saturday night. This is my favorite show (so far) in the Shooting Gallery's new space and was packed full of art, a mini bar, and cowhide rugs. The Red Truck Gallery chose works with clear craftsmanship and it was easy to see in Ian Berry's denim assemblages and Chris Roberts-Antieau's awesome quilts. The space was completely packed, making it hard to see each piece individually, but this show deserves a second trip anyway. I look forward to spending more time with the chandeliers, automatons, and paintings before the show comes down on May 4th.
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