Alias Arts

Ginou Choueiri is Lebanese artist living in Beirut. She says about her potato portraits:

“I chose the potato to portray human faces because of the many striking parallels. Not only is their skin porous like ours, but their skin texture and color is very similar, and like us, they come in different sizes, shapes and forms. Potatoes grow, live, and then decay, mirroring the ephemeral existence and fragility of our own human nature.”

One of our favorite artists collectives is Bruce High Quality Foundation. If you’re not familiar with their “Public Sculpture Tackles” here’s their artists statement:

“Public sculpture is not merely a designed fight against the elements of nature, it is also a fight against people, against rambunctious children, graffiti writers, pigeon poop, and the homeless. It is the very character of public sculpture to be, first and foremost, on defense. The cube tilted on its corner is but the most obvious example of a defensive design approach to art’s engagement with the public.

The series of photographs, Public Sculpture Tackle, documents another approach to public art – the design of failure. Artists dressed in makeshift athletic uniforms and padding leap and lunge against a number of different public sculptures in Manhattan. In a contest between individualistic energy and engineered public adornment, we all know who will win.

Ad Reinhardt, understanding the full paradox of the eternal aspirations of art, titled one of his nearly black paintings, Timeless Painting, 1960. It is this continuing contest between timelessness and timeliness that forms the context for the Public Sculpture Tackle series. The photographs hold fast the humor and pathos of a moment when art does what it does – whatever we ought not bother trying, or as Bruce might have it – the impossible.”

Masterpiece 2.0, a social media art project by Baschz and Selfcontrolfreak.

So much fun to see our daughter Samantha make her cameo in Baschz and Selfcontrolfreak’s wonderful social media art project, Masterpiece 2.0.

Thanks guys!

We absolutely loved this street intervention project in which the artists the altered public lighting in Tel Aviv’s open underground tunnels.

Artists Bar&Shay said their street art muse was Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz as they altered the tunnel from this….

to this….

A few weeks ago, Vhils showed us a rough cut of a short film he was making about new work he was doing in Portugal. We were blown away, not just by the piece but also from how exquisitely is was filmed.

This morning Vhils put the final film up on Youtube. We love the film and the text that goes with it:

Scratching the Surface

“Sous les pavés, la plage!” (Beneath the paving stones – the beach!) – Anonymous graffiti, Paris 1968.

Paris, May 1968. When the enragés started digging up the stones from the Boulevard St. Michel to use them as weapons against the forces of the old order, they came upon the sand that covered the surface underneath them. The earth. Beneath the concrete, the earth. Beneath the urban environment, nature. Beneath the artificial, life.

Behind all these brick and concrete walls, these dull, grey surfaces that condition our existence, behind all of these cities, there is life. There are individuals, there is nature. “Scratching the surface” is an act of creation taken from lifeless forms. It is the subversion of lifeless forms. The act of engraving the idea of life on a wall, of creating the image of an individual, an iconographic piece of representational symbolism that will endure. As if rendering him eternal by bringing him to life where life was not supposed to be. By carving it out of that which is still-born by its very nature, by its design.

So until the symbolical demise of all walls that separate, that impose, that condition, of a social system that overbuilds in order to control and perpetuate its grasp on the divisions that stem from this eternal partitioning and keep individuals in place, it will be easier and easier to forget who we are, where we come from and what nature is really all about. How easy it is to lose track of what our nature really is while caught amid this saturated, un-organic environment. “

Vhils is currently working on work for an upcoming solo show at Steve Lazarides’ new gallery on Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia. Vhils’ work is stunning in video and photos on the web, but nothing beats seeing the work first hand.

More from Sir X here.

Lucas Murgida at 667 Shotwell from Chris Sollars on Vimeo.

Lucas Murgida’s performances and public interventions is the type of “street art” that lately we’ve become fascinated with. If you’re not familiar with Lucas’ work, watch Chris Sollars’ video above.

Five ( Dramatic Pauses ) from Brendan Bell on Vimeo.

Artist Statement:

“We let the television news into the perceived safety of our lives on a daily basis. Even without direct contact, the language of the medium connects with us via background noise, internet blips, and watercooler small-talk. It has a distinct, and often overlooked, authority over the way we think and feel.

The nightly half-hour national news format attempts to condense the state of the world into easily digestible soundbites. My intention is to release these soundbites, inherent powers intact, realign them and force them to interact in unintended ways.

For seven months, I watched NBC Nightly News, recording phrases that piqued my interest. I focused on this single media outlet to give the project a specific voice and began reconfiguring the phrases into what can best be described as collage poems. Poetry, like the news media, uses evocative language to provide insight into the inner workings of the world. However, poetry allows subtleties and subtext to take center stage. The resulting collage poems highlight the ambiguous spaces between language and life, exposing the vagaries of the ostensibly concrete world around us.

The term (Dramatic Pause) implies a brief deviation from an intended script, or a small crack in real time, where things that are normally hidden become visible. It is based on instructions written for news broadcasters on their teleprompters.”

There’s now an interactive Google map which documents all the different spots in New York that were part of last month’s amazing NYSAT project. If you’re unaware NYSAT, check the Public Ad Campaign website.

The map includes images of the sites that were painted white, images of the artwork that was created, web links, video footage, and personal stories.

Click here to check it out.