Last Thursday night, Nick Thomm’s latests solo exhibition, Tropic Glows, opened.
Thomm took over the entire two-story space, transforming the basement into a fully immersive screening room, in which he housed his intricate 3D video works, while upstairs played host to both the crowds and a combination of Thomm’s mixed media works on fluro Plexiglass, holographic skate decks and neon pieces.
We included below 3 animated GIF works by the artist. We like them very much. Do you?
Exhibition runs until November 18th @ Castle Fitzjohns Gallery. 98 Orchard St, Lower East Side, New York (Open 7 Days, 12PM-7PM).
AK47, an active artist involved in underground and alternative sub-culture circuits since the 1980s, is back in London for a solo show of commercial works at the Maurice Einhardt Neu gallery.
You may have come across AK47 bullets around the street of East London. If you have not, take a look at the video we have included below.
“Bullets Straight from the Heart” will comprises a series of heart-shaped works with bullets sandwiched between two sheets of perspex, their tip piercing through the front sheet, spell out words and phrases such as LOVE, HATE, KISS ME. These dictums or mandates readily reveal themselves when the viewer stands immediately in front of an individual piece. Direct exchange ensues — the back perspex is mirrored and reflects back to us our own image, the bullets targeting head or chest depending on our individual height. Until this point, when viewed at an angle, the bullets appear like batteries of missiles ready to launch.
‘Love Hearts’ — the tablet-shaped fruit-flavoured sweets, that feature prominently in the artist’s childhood memories, come together in Bullets Straight from the Heart, with another potent childhood memory: playing with guns. The snappy love-related messages of 1970s pastel-coloured confectionary are rehashed and perforated in the juxtaposition of these two referents.
Interaction continues also at the point of sale, with the smaller works in the show flat-packed in pizza boxes ready for self-assembly.
What – AK47 “Bullets Straight from the Heart” solo show When – The exhibition opens to the public daily on Thursday 7th November and runs until 19th November 2013 from 12 noon – 7 pm FREE ENTRY. Where – THE MAURICE EINHARDT NEU GALLERY | 30a Redchurch Street | London E2 7DP
Modern Panic is our forth-coming exhibition, showcasing the work of provocative artists from around the world, from infamous prisoner Charles Bronson, Bolivian enfant terrible and coca-leaf artist Gaston Ugalde, taxidermy artist Iris Schieferstein, who’s hoof boots have been sought after by the likes of Lady Gaga, the provocative Kira O’Reilly, Tank Girl comic artist Rufus Dayglo and over 50 others!
Modern Panic is a well needed look into the worlds we inhabit and is designed to shake the viewer awake through a bewildering bombardment of the senses.
Modern Panic is a sequel to the popular Panic Exhibition we held in 2009, which featured the founding members of the Panic Movement (formed in the 1960’s by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor), next to the new wave of controversial modern artists.
During our Private View on Fri 3rd June, we will be presenting a Panic Happening: Many artists will be spontaneously creating their art live in a 3 hour ‘Panic’ inspired happening, consisting of performance art, site specific characters, live sonic sounds, and plenty of interactive installations. ‘The Aftermath’ of this panic happening will then take the form of the exhibition.
Panic Movement (Mouvement Panique) was a collective formed by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor in Paris, France in 1962. Inspired by and named after the god Pan, and influenced by Luis Buñuel and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, the group concentrated on chaotic happenings containing performance art and surreal imagery, designed to be shocking, as a response to surrealism becoming petite bourgeoisie and to release destructive energies in search of peace and beauty.
Launched at Ickworth House in Suffolk in July 2011 (Now that would be) Telling is a collaborative project between the artist Hayley Lock, curator Catherine Hemelryk and writers Jessica Hart, Lucinda Hawksley, Ben Moor, Hallie Rubenhold and Liz Williams.
Lock and the writers have created a series of site-specific works in English stately homes. Part myth and part encrypted biography, these works reveal/conceal parallel histories of the residents of these remarkable homes.
For Transition Gallery Lock is showing a series of works originally made for a grand home proudly situated in rural Bedfordshire. These portraits of the real and imagined lovers of the Lady of the House use mirrors and light to form a multiple of 28 and include a new portrait of the Lady herself. Lock meshes a range of sumptuous materials including velvets, brocades gilt and fringing into the portraits referencing the imagined interiors of Caddington Hall the family house. Elsewhere the digitally enhanced landscapes play out their stories of love, romance and deceit in an uncanny space where truth and fiction, history and scandal collide.
Scream Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of young and emerging British and international artists, who have a common desire to explore and create alternative realities. They transport you on a dream-like journey to another time or place, with inspiration drawn from fairy-tales, surrealism, nature, the human body and childhood.
Featured artists
Malgosia Stepnik – Poland | Clare Chapman – UK | Chinwook Kim – South Korea | Guillermo de Zamacona – Mexico | Ann-Marie James – UK | LG White – The Netherlands | Wayne Chisnall – UK
The opening night is on Thursday 13th January – strict guest list only
When: 14/01 till 20/02/2010
Where: Scream Gallery | 34 Bruton Street | London WIJ 6QX, UK | +44 (0)20 7493.7388
Email: info@screamlondon.com
We all use these days USB keys or also called Flash stick. It has become so easy now to carry data and in some cases quite a lot of data. In other words, the technology is here and well established and shall get better and better with more and more storage. Continue reading USB keys: not just for data, for your eyes too→
We are always happy to see people dedicated to bringing art into communities that typically remain miles away from it for various reasons, such as poverty.
So when we heard about this project, called “Pachuca Paints Itself”, in central Mexico by an artists’ collective known as the German Crew, we had to feature it on Art-Pie.
Click on the pictures to enlarge
Hundreds of houses painted
The collective spent 14 months turning the steep hillside area of Las Palmitas into something a colossal and very much alive mural. It was an incredible effort to change people’s perception of a neighbourhood previously seen as rather gloomy and rough – art at its best, art to its best use.
“We have painted 209 houses. Every color represents the soul of the neighborhood. It has been a community effort as each household has participated in some way,” said project director Enrique Gomez, who goes by MYBE.
MYBE is a reformed and tattooed gang member who is now focusing all his attention on graffiti art and muralism.
The project in numbers –
– 209 house painted
– 5,000 gallons (20,000 litres) of paint used
– More than 16,000 square feet (1,500 square meters) of murals covered
Even better, we hear that thanks to the huge success of this project, another impoverished area called Cubitos, is next to be painted happy.
Gaston Gouron is a visual media artist based in Brussels. His work caught my attention at a show about art books. Not by surprise, yet I think more by design, I had picked out each of Gaston’s three artworks on display before swooping in to catch a word with him. I arranged to meet two days later in Bar De Matin – BDM to those in the know – a chatty bar in Place Eugéne. I went in with having noted down a few choice questions and also the book ‘The Secret War between Downloading and Uploading’. I’d intended this as a visual prompt to get us going on a Sunday morning. Luckily too we’re both keen on our coffee! Gaston launched in by telling me that notorious mega-uploads site had just been killed-off by the US government’s new anti-piracy laws.
‘Tutt!!’ He mentioned also the group called Script-Kiddies who work anonymously, and how he was fond of subverting the hacking potential of freewares like Keylogger to the advantage of as a tool for making artwork. He also threw in the word Caviarder – but not to be cast aside, really that word defines Gaston Gouron’s working process – which for him is to make things in a simple way or with no design.
Maybe this makes him a censor of what he considers to be an over-design of things? I asked him how much he thought his work to take refuge in and show hallmarks of the graffiti artist – expressive, edgy, playful? Here is the interview.
Media artist Gaston Gouron presiding over the inspired techno-language-sculpture ‘Never-ending Conversation’ at the exhibition 50 Livres D’Artistes which happened 19–21 Jan 2012 – an annual showcase of students’ work from Lacambre Arts Visuels, Brussels
PW: Please describe your working method relating to the artwork Never-ending Conversation, exhibited in 50 Livres d’ Artistes at ARA (Amis de la Reliure d’Art) Belgica in January.
GG: It’s totally process driven, and it’s about finding a moment when something flips into being interesting, no; in fact, amazing. I do this on the web, chasing links that may have been sparked by a conversations with friends or a hangover from a previous idea.
Never-ending Conversation comes off the back of me buzzing around the internet and settling on something amazing. An example is when I discovered Chatbot, a web-based AI that you can talk with. I like to have fun with things so I was cutting & pasting text between the two conversation boxes to see how absurd it could be. But instead, Chatbot was sufficiently intelligent enough and made responses to expressions how you’d expect a human conversation to go.
That conversation became the default material I wanted to work with for one of my projects. As a bee might extract and pollinate, I wanted to do the same. Taking from one place and have it settle in another. Pollinating might be stretching the bee analogy too far though. It’s not that serious, really I’m simply interested in making things feel new.
PW: The artwork which you called Never-ending Conversation is very sculptural and invades the exhibition space but also plays with text that came literally out of thin air (or more aptly, it came virtually from the chatbot’s AI). So, how do you deal with the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ and did that affect the way you chose to exhibit the artwork at 50 Livres d’Artistes?
GG: On the one hand I’m not proud to see the work presented. In reality it should appear more disordered. I created the original version in my bedroom which is more a workspace. I’m a collector too, collecting documentation about programming language and old network cables.
In a more common workspace environment Never-ending Conversation looks more ‘gutsy’ – how you’d expect a living machine should be. But when I saw it set-up in the exhibition space it looked, well… Naked! but I understand that the conditions – or restrictions – between workspace and exhibition space are very different.
In the stark, brightly lit – and clean! – exhibition space of ARA (a space with an orthodox for presenting aesthetically-biased artbook artists) I imagine my work is more readable to an audience. But It would be a great idea to have the work redone – simply to make the sprawling technology in the sculpture more obvious, revealing more about how it was put together. I’m really aware that I don’t want to conceal any part of the process.
PW: Which technological forms tend to produce the best renditions of language or ‘text-sampling’ that you’ve seen recently?
GG: Basic plain text.
I prefer reading rather than to listen to spoken words.
I just love data.
It’s strange I know, but more recently I’ve been understanding why my work borders on being seen as simplistic – which is a good thing. One thing is knowing about a study a friend sent to me. It shows that we read in contours – going from the corner of a page to the centre. So I think I’m interested in written material. Then I think about if it should be offered up as a bound-book, a pamphlet, a techno-language-sculpture. These are vessels and simply carry the language, I’m not even sure they’re that an important part of the process. The finding and discovering is more what I’m into.
PW: What’s interesting or peculiar that you’ve discovered about the ins and outs of language when you’re thinking how it needs to appear in or affect a piece of work?
GG: It’s that English language is most important in the creation process. It’s the language of IT and because I’m working a lot with script languages, English is most widely used. My mother tongue is French, but it’s not the language of IT and because I’m into revealing all of the process I’m always going to be showing parts of script and programming language.
One other thing is that using the French language this might make my work appear to be more exotic and specialist. It’s the opposite – I want to hit on an international crowd with an equally international language and for them to read the words. If they admire the vessel in which it’s concealed, then great, but for me it’s about getting the language to speak for itself.
PW: Who has done the most, or been most instinctive, in making the printed word part of their bank of visual language?
GG: I have several references. I would say the graphic works of Marcel Broadthaer’s and he’s Belgian. Japanese artist On Kawara is a big inspiration. He made two books retracing one million years – making the words and numbers from the dates into material – which then could be bound in a book, spoken out aloud and painted on a canvas (then, showing me on the screen of his laptop) like this.
I also can’t forget North Amercian artist Ed Ruscha for his famous graphics and text paintings. In England there’s Daniel Eatock – I love his work; well more than love. It’s his approach – easy and efficient. Then there’s Vaska who is Eatock’s founding partner of the web-building-platform Indexhibit. He came into my school last year. Working together they made the most clean of interfaces.
PW: ‘Artbook’ as a category seems an anathema to your visual language because you’re looking for ways of re-doing and re-showing printed texts. I can see a binary to the way you bulk-up on language and downplay the format (or vessel as you refer). You serve-up things leaving the text in it’s raw elemental form – to fend for itself. So, how do you think your work relates to the ready-made, or made-ready?
GG: I produced Never-ending Conversation on a course I was studying at Lacambre Artes Visuels in Brussels. It was only 3 months and the course was refreshing because of the trans-disciplinary interests of the students I was studying with. Everyone doing this short-course was coming from a bigger discipline including design, photography, typography, urban space and for me it’s graphic communication. A bias is coming in too from a fine-art background but I’m also a programmer.
The tutors were really supportive an encouraged us to explore ideas. It’s completely energizing to share ideas with such a diversity of artistic personalities.
My work relates to the ready-made in process really. I do things to get rid of some idea – maybe to bank them so I can buzz on the next amazing discovery.
PW: We could go on, but thanks Gaston for the giving a nice twist to thinking about the how artbooks can still be brought to life beyond the printed and bound page.
GG: That’s OK
Gaston Gouron is currently writing his transcript for application to RCA, London.
Related: From 26 January to 6 May 2012 MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna is delighted to present Marcel Broodthaers. L’espace de l’écriture, the first complete retrospective in Italy devoted to the Belgian artist, curated by Gloria Moure.
We met with Astro Naut who can be described as a street art sculptor. We need more of his stuff out there as what he does is just awesome and more importantly we like very much the manufacturing aspect of it. Did I mention that he is from Spain, a very creative place.
Astro Naut was kind enough to answer a few questions:
ARTPIE: Tell us about yourself/your crew in a few words? ASTRO NAUT: Astro Naut is just me, myself and I. I started drawing and pasting up my street art character in 2008 in Madrid, Spain
A-P: For how long have you been doing street art? A N: I started doing street art in the beginning of 2008, I think. I discover the freedom and the exiting of illegally and I fall in love with it..
A-P: And what drove you towards sculptures rather than other mediums such as paint? A N: I do all the techniques with my character. I paint, paste up, but what I prefer the most is the sculptures, the toyz. I think It´s another step in street art and I love it!
A-P: What are you trying to say if anything through your sculptures, if anything? A N: mmmm, there´s no a specific message.
A-P: Tell us a bit more what your sculpture are made of/ your making process? A N: The mattress if made of silicon. The toyz are made of plaster and painted with spray and markers.
A-P: Any other project in the pipeline A N: Well, I´m developing the second generation of my sculptures. And I´ve just finished this mural in Madrid.. (see photo below)
“Bullets Straight from the Heart” will comprises a series of heart-shaped works with bullets sandwiched between two sheets of perspex, their tip piercing through the front sheet, spell out words and phrases such as LOVE, HATE, KISS ME. These dictums or mandates readily reveal themselves when the viewer stands immediately in front of an individual piece. Direct exchange ensues — the back perspex is mirrored and reflects back to us our own image, the bullets targeting head or chest depending on our individual height. Until this point, when viewed at an angle, the bullets appear like batteries of missiles ready to launch.
