At the end of September I was able to check out Alife’s new art gallery that opened on Rivington St. on the Lower East Side. It’s right next door to their new store, A.R.C. Sports Shop, which is directly across the street from their original store.
The inaugural opening of the gallery was a slick display of a timespan of photos from downtown photography legend Clatyon Patterson.
This was my favorite piece:
All great stuff. Be sure to check out the recent release of the documentary, Captured, on Clayton Patterson. The film follows how he witnessed the Lower East Side riots during the eighties crack epidemic and pre-9/11 gentrification of the neighborhood. Really great film.
For A While Now David Choe Has Been One Of My Top Three Favorite Artist That I’ve Wanted To Meet, I Actually Got To Meet David Choe Around This Time Last Year When He Was Outside On One Of These Scaffolding Machine Things Painting The Front Of The LAZARIDES Gallery’s“Outsiders NY” Show.
Some Cool Art Stuff Going Ons That I Need To Check Out. FRANCINE SPIEGEL’S MUD AND MILK AT DEITCH
October 01, 2009 — October 31, 2009
76 Grand Street, New York
FRANCINE SPIEGEL presents seven new paintings and a suite of photographs from a secret performance piece for her debut solo exhibition at Deitch Projects. During the opening Francine will enact one of her messy, sloppy performances in the storefront gallery that visitors can view from the street, shielded form the flying fluids by the front window.
Francine is a young painter living in upstate New York whose overall oeuvre seeks what Barbara Creed terms the “monstrous feminine.” Stitched together porno-Frankenstein style, the fragmented females depicted in her paintings are half-alive and half-dead, half-confused and half-horny. Built up from imagery stolen from monster magazines, horror films, or fetish websites, Spiegel’s fantastically seductive hotties look like gory super-heroines. Their abject gazes attract and repel like soggy Medusas.
Francine Spiegel received her BFA from RISD in 1997 and has been featured in Mail Order Monsters, a traveling exhibition of monstrous figuration at Deitch Projects Summer 2008, and was included in Fractured Figure curated by Jeffrey Deitch for the DESTE Foundation, 2008. Her work is also featured in New York Minute at the MACRO FUTURE through November 2009.
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And This I’m Really Excited About! My friend Jon Bocksel Hipped Me To This. THE NY ART BOOK FAIR Printed Matter’s annual fair of contemporary art books, art catalogs, artists’ books, art periodicals, and ‘zines. Admission to the fair is FREE.
STAR WARS GALAXY 4 CUSTOM SKETCH CARD SHOW AND AUCTION!
OCTOBER 2 at APW GALLERY LONG ISLAND CITY NEW YORK 6 – 9 PM
Morgan AKA Sucklord will be releasing his new retro style SUCKPAX Suckadelic indie art card series that I made some original sketch cards for. Here’s a couple of new ones I recently made in addition to the ones I made before.
I Constantly Have videos on play while I’m working on stuff, I love tunes but a huge influence on my work is films, I just like to pick a movie and watch it over and over and subconsciously let it work it’s way into my drawings.
Here’s what’s currently on my DVD playlist:
The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie.
In Luis Bunuel’s satiric, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined. Perhaps his greatest film, Bunuel’s absurdist view of the upper class is a timeless satire about consumerism and class privilege in a late capitalist world.
Dither’s Disc 2
Art aficionado and filmmaker Reid van Renesse focuses on graffiti and other street art in this sweeping exploration of contemporary urban painting. In interviews with some 30 artists, Van Renesse highlights their intriguing underground culture. Painters, photographers and others — including Sam Flores, Andy Mueller, Ricky Powell, David Choe, Dug One and Tiffany Bozic — discuss their creations, their motivations and the state of art today.
I think the Ricky Powell Interview is hilarious because he keeps losing his focus on account of his cat Blackberry, I keep watching that one.
I made a package of some drawings recently for my photographer friend Suzette Lee, I packaged them in a cardboard envelop with a copy of an art zine and a buncha smaller drawings inside I been slacking majorly on dropping it off for her and since the envelop has been sitting around my apt for a while I started doodling on the outside of it, here’s the front and the back
I met Suzette when we used to work together at a art gallery in the East Village, since then we’ve both moved on to other ventures but have still managed to stay in contact over the years, she’s a really great pal and an awesome photographer
Check out more of her surreal photos here: smallmediumlee.com
I hope she likes it.
Here’s some older drawings I came across from around the time I moved to NY around 2005.
Check ‘em out.
This is a drawing I made in collaboration with my younger cousin’s son Angel back in Chicago. When he was visiting I would encourage him to doodle and draw on paper, I love how young kids are instantly amazing artist, he created these circular patterns in pencil and then I would draw over them. I still wish to somehow continue this series some day.
These are a couple of portraits I worked on my first few months after moving to Brooklyn.
And a Craaazy Skull, part of a bigger drawing.
Here’s some new stuff I’ve been working on as of late. I’m going to be in a large group show in November entitled “Go Get Your Shinebox” put together by Brookynite Gallery.
Rae, the owner of the gallery, invited me to participate. It’s a show about the effect the terrible economy is having on working-class artists and how they would survive if they were to be living on the streets. Brooklynite gallery is a really rad and innovative gallery that does a lot of work with fresh artists, so I’m stoked to be involved. Considering that I’ve been out of work for several months, this show struck a chord with my belief in self-resourcefulness and has given me a chance to fully express my feelings of being a starving artist at the moment.
Here’s some details on the show: “This show will be about giving the middle finger to corporate America and beyond– These boxes will be our petition. The message will be made loud and clear that the purpose of this show is a response to the insane amounts of unregulated bailouts & corporate bonuses that continue to slap us across the face while many wait on unemployment lines, loose their homes and don’t have a pot to piss in or window to throw it out….
We already have alot of press people asking us for more info about this show & We are trying to secure sponsorship to take these boxes down to ART BASEL in Miami as well…
Please keep in mind the box you will create can be used to house ANYTHING you might need to make a living on the streets– One artist talked about theirs being a portable whore house– a box filled with sex toys and condoms– the outside of the box a red blinking neon light. Another artist is also a DJ and thought about putting a mini-record player inside. And so on– the point is the term “SHINEBOX” can really be expanded upon… If you had to hit the streets to make money what would you do? What would bring in the money you needed to survive? This box– doesn’t even have to be a box. It can be round. It can perishable. It can be alive. Found, modified, store bought–etc. The main thing is it’s a SURVIVAL BOX.”
And here’s my box…still in the works.
My mom found the box and well, she knows I have a certain obsession with collecting found objects and unique boxes. She gave it to me when I was last in town visiting her and it was really good timing and felt perfect for the show. It’s got an awesome glass top with really great lettering on it that says “Ye’ Old Cheese Chest” which I also take as a double meaning with the term “cheese” being a reference to collatoral as in, “Let me get that cheese.” It would have been even better if it said “Ye Old Cabbage Chest.”
Once I got back to NY I asked my mom to send the box which she inadvertently filled with some pieces from my installation I made recently in Chicago. When it arrived I saw that she had kick started my idea of filling the box with random objectual necessities that I always keep nearby. I have kept the box placed in the center of my living room for the past two months and have continued to fill it with the obejects I find necessary to have in my daily life.
So far the box is full of blunt wrappers, mouse traps, enough pills to kill yourself with, drug packets with drug residue, rubber gloves, candles, smokes, empty cig boxes, baseball cards, sage, sweet grass, a anatomical skeleton hand, Vaseline, robotussin, a to do list, random phone numbers, a semi/broken digital camera, counterfit money and a birthday card from my deadbeat father I haven’t talked to in years.
I’ve also started wheatpasting the outside of the box with photographs I take and found text I have been infatuated with as of lately that speaks on the ground floor daily hustle of trying to make it in a less then favorable living sitution. And yes I work out of my kitchen, haha!
I’m really looking forward to the show. Get Paid.
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Another thing I’ve been working on is a series of trading cards for my good friend Morgan’s Suckadelic art show.
I met Morgan about a year ago when I interviewed him for a magazine– he was my first interview and it was funny because he couldn’t have been a better sport about it. Since then I have become a witness to his solid artistic integrity and dedication to his vision, I now consider him a close friend. Always steady on the grind, he’s invited me to be a part of his upcoming art show and create some one-of-a-kind “Sketch Cards” for his highly anticipated custom trading cards series to be released soon.
I like the way this one of his Vectar character about to do some space drugs came out the most, it’s also one of my favorite episodes of his, I know I’m a nerd.
Watch the episode:
There is going to be a Sketch Card Show and Auction for the last batch of custom sketch cards that were made for the Star Wars Galaxy Series and 40 artist are making custom Sucklord 600 figures.
Free beer and toys. I can’t wait, should be a good time. www.suckadelic.com
The Suckadelic sketch cards thing was kinda a good kick in the pants after the last couple of art shows I was in. I’ve been a little burnt out and was not really making the time to work on anything in the last couple months, but once I started working on the small scale trading cards for Morgan I was able to get the creative juices flowing again and have started making some mixed- media larger size drawings.
I was just splattering ink and marker around, I work in a sort of layer pattern so I’ll probably keep working on these.
The paper they are drawn on is found paper I came across when I was commissioned to do a mural inside an old building on State and Lake in downtown Chicago. In the 70s it used to be a men’s clothing store and in the basement of the building we came across a backroom piled to the ceiling with old suits and stacks of this paper. I like that the paper has the name of The Haberdasher’s shop in the corner and at the moment I have a endless supply of it.
and the back
