Public art on the streets of Manhattan

City Hall public art.

Pattern inspiration from real life

Sometimes the things that inspire imagination aren't man-made. In this case, they are at least mad-placed - but despite being in the SF conservatory they do suggest glorious fabric patterns and information mappings.

Information sweeping into a shared stream.


Layers of fabric


Silk folded like private skin


And reflections of it all.

Fura's street art photos from San Francisco

San Francisco has a lot of interesting and well done street art. Fura was active with her camera. Here is a selection of them.

Tony Oursler at Metro Pictures

I hadn't realized myself to be a Tony Oursler fan until I discovered that I've enjoyed works of his from the Milwaukee Art Museum and other museams. Metro Pictures hosted an ambitious exhibition of his recent work - massive 3D forms with complex projections.

The objects were intricately masked and secondary projectors threw background details on the environment. Each object held many eyes and mouths - watching, blinking, and speaking.



The video was altered and blended to feel something like clouds or mercury genetically melded with humans. You almost felt sorry for these amoeba-like creatures, frozen, still, and yet watching you and speaking pathetically as if a conversation might ensue.



To call myself a fan is too strong - rather I respect the work and was impressed and drawn in. It motivated my emotions and drew my empathy, but still the ugliness of it also repelled me.

The McCoy's at Postmasters

Postmasters continually shows interesting work - not always or even often appealing but very interesting media art. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's Directed Dreaming series touched on the boundaries of conceptually appealing and technically interesting.

The pieces move though mechanical rotation of scenes and backgrounds, observed by arching camera eyes and lit by blaring arched lights. The live video feeds are either projected on the wall or shown through small lcd screens.



The projections blur the line between live and recorded media. The feeds are live - but since they are tightly focused on the moving dioramas in front of them, they in fact play and endless loop of video.



The scenes observed by the camera reference 1950's idealism mixed with a surreal shifting of scale and blending of elements. The feeds in the largest piece are layered two sleeping occupants appear to dream the elements on the rotating disks before them. In the smaller projection piece the eight cameras switch between elements which seem tied into a single story occuring on the front and back of the installation.

Calder maquettes at Pace Wildenstein

Calder's works continue to attract me - from his mobiles and miniature animals to his giant public pieces. Pace Wildenstein exhibited a series of maquettes and small versions of his large scale works.

His simple palette of colors - primary and bold or black and white - and the shapes that somehow invite me to climb over them and slip between them - were striking in the gallery. Even the slightly vaulted ceiling of the place with its rivets and wood beams fit the work.



Perhaps some day I will make a mobile that feels as some of these do to me, or discover something in the shapes and edges of my work that feels this way.

Chelsea - March 2006 - sound and scent

This weekend Fura and I explored the Chelsea galleries. We started at Postmasters and wound our way through the district following descriptions we'd marked in Time Out.

Much of the work we most enjoyed came from the ones we chose based on curiosity rather than a sense of who the artist was. The most surprising of these is a scent and light installation by Charlotta Westergren at Bellwether Gallery (134 Tenth Ave).

A 30 second Quicktime of Charlotta Westergren's installation.

The scent was salty and floral and did permeate the space. She had worked with the scent technicians at West International to find a scent that matched her childhood memories of the Swedish Coast. The light in the hallway was red and the bulbs looked old, the space merged into a center room painted all white and diffusely lit so that nothing felt clear - like the soft wash of childhood memories.



At another gallery further uptown we found an odd installation of work the felt drawn from high school boredom sketched on the inside of notebooks and blown to fit the walls of a giant gallery. But some of the elements interested me - like this wobbly skinny impossible arm extending from the wall. It's fist clasped about a cord holding a filled paint bucket just above the floor. The temptation to reach out and swing the bucket was almost impossible to resist. And I found myself wondering if the elements did in fact have the weight they pretended.



Tucked in the back of the gallery, a video portrait of a man and a woman drowned just before you. The two screens focused on two people just below the surface of gently sussurating water. Their eyes blinked and they seemed to be exhaling, no matter how long you looked on.

An 8 second Quicktime of the video portrait.

The Butterfly

The Ludlow Butterfly who reminds me of a tattoo from Gaiman's Books of Magic.

Stickers on Ludlow

Ludlow carries it's history and a peeling skin of it's self concept in stickers and graffiti.

Tats Cru - street art advertisements

Look around New York these days, and on many of the Lower East Side streets you'll find ads by Tats Cru for things like the PS2 and new WiFi cameras - they are done in a street art style.

The Tats Cru halloween greeting

A whole series of these cute PS2 characters are on many construction scaffolds and walls.

Viral Small Art

So the other recent posts haven't been of small art - but this one is.

Andre the Giant - one of the best and most pervasive and most often reinterpreted pieces of viral art. I found this one on my way through security heading back to New York from Milwaukee. But I've seen Andre art in Europe, under train tressels, in schools, on the sides of buildings, and online.

Milwaukee street art

On a visit to Milwaukee for my cousin's wedding I found myself with some time to explore downtown Milwaukee. Down an alley near the heart of the city, I came across this vibrantly painted wall. It seemed the work of only a few artists and spoke to a number of political and social themes.



Closer to the museum I found a few chalk drawings. This ebullient squirrel is my favorite from the set.

NYC Lower East Side - street art as advertisement

Since I've moved to this neighborhood I've been noticing the street art more often.

These visually strong and massive works dominate a section of Ludlow just above Delancey.
These again stand on the edge of advertising. Around the corner, in a small gallery the artists work is sold - on t-shirts, hoodies, giant posters, and commissions can be requested. It is graphically strong work - and the artist does deserve recognition - but I found I looked at the work with a cooler eye after finding the gallery.

Fame Game isn't advertising - but it is in the same area. It's one of a few pieces of multimedia grafitti I've seen. A carefully cut palette spells out "Fame Game" and the collage and grafitti on the wall behind speaks to many images of commentary on fame.

Under a Seattle Bridge

Parts of a series of large and fairly innocent grafitti under an overpass and along the edge of a gully full of old growth trees.

The Last LIttle Bits

The starfish creator may be the same as the cat - both the feel of the character and the style are very close.

I am not even sure what it says - but it's sign language.

The city also hosted a few small stencilers. This seahorse is one exanple.

Just around the corner from the Freyjugata place I found both of the following:

Milk cartons

There did not seem to be many people doing street art in downtown Reyjkavik: the eyes; the cat and other friendly creatures; the ghosts; the stenciller; and the Milk cartons.

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Small scale ones on the postal service stickers.

A larger version, shows the handwork.

An informal installation of street art in the basement of a demolished building.

Foreign Mail

You may notice in the first entry in this blog that the milk cartons are printed on a United States Postal Service sticker.

In Reykjavik, I found postal appropriations only from the US and Germany - either we're popular nations for alternative commentary or our postal services are the only ones that make their labels so openly available.

Not sure if this was the same artist - but certainly a similar feel.

The art's host - The Sirkus Flee Market wall.

Small Art as Advertising

Street art styling has been frequently used in advertising but it's less common to find street art used as an ad itself.

Throughout the streets of Reykjavik 101 you'll find these small sheep lacquered to the walls. They catch the eye as strong, simple graphic. However once you hit the main shopping street downtown you realize...

that they are a clever advertisement for the Osoma store. This is one of the first examples I have seen of this kind of co-opting of street art for advertising (rather than using street art in advertisements).

This cat appears in a number of forms - sometimes fanged, sometimes winged.

Reykjavik 101

Walking the streets of Reykjavik, Misa and I discovered a surprisingly strong street graphic culture.

This cat appears in a number of forms - sometimes fanged, sometimes winged.

The milk cartons are everywhere - on the wall outside the bar, printed on US postal service labels, on the side of construction pits. The artists selects locations for color and often uses edges of walls to wrap the flat graphic into a 3D shape.

The milk carton in context of other popular themes: the floating eyes, the ghosts, and others.

The flying eyes on the wall of the Sirkus flea market.

A ghost or perhaps an octopus. The character often looks like the Ms. Pacman ghosts, but the shape may refer to something else.

The ghost wrapped in a corner.

I liked the off-kilter shape of this rabbit form.