Alias Arts

Jim tells us:

“The area that I’ve been spending time in has multiple abandon buildings, which are amazing. Unfortunately it also has a ton of trash scattered between the buildings. I decided to clean up the area by dragging all the junk into one location and making something out of it. With a little help I pulled four beds, six tires, and a large amount of scrap into one consolidated area… The trash that was scattered everywhere, was transformed into one giant character who found a great place to relax.”

From our friend Scott Wayne Indiana:

“Last year I spent a day in my hometown of Keizer, Oregon. Driving through the neighborhoods brought extremely specific memories to the surface. Curiously reflecting on that day, I decided to draw (with masking tape) a floorplan to scale of my childhood home to see what memories would reveal themselves to me. I chose a location in Central Park alongside ballfields where I’d feel comfortable spending time in my space.

To paraphrase Aldous Huxley, everyone’s memory is their private literature. And, personally, my experience turned out to be more about the sensory memory that consumed me in the space, and less about interesting details. Which is to say, this experiment creates a highly subjective effect. For example, I had a deep sense of remembering the feeling of looking over at the kitchen as my mom finished preparing dinner. Consequently, I won’t go into the minutia of my excavated memories. However, if this sounds intriguing to you, find a fitting public space and give it a try.”

From Sean:

These are the first posters to hit the streets in an ongoing experimental campaign to raise cognitive awareness and more importantly to inspire benevolent action that we often forget, oversee, or might be in opposition to our often hedonistic culture.”

More from pilpeled here.

As the impact of the current downturn in the global economy worsens, and more and more storefronts are being abandoned and boarded up, we expect to see more street art urban regeneration projects like ‘Post No Bills, Post Pretty ART’ in in downtown Edmonton, AB.

A group of local artists in Edmonton are encouraging other artists (local or international) to put up their work throughout the Summer. The project is being done without any grants, sponsorship or permission. The organizers explain –

“We feel the creation of the artwork free from these constraints allows a more honest and organic artistic expression. We decided to focus on this building as it’s on a busy intersection of downtown and it seemed absolutely appalling from a pedestrian and urban experience point of view to simply leave this building boarded up–essentially it is unused space that people scurry around to avoid like the plague. Thus, we put up some of our work and it was really nice to actually see people slow down and examine some of the pieces (the paint chip one really throws people in a bender!)–we think there’s a real appreciation for street art and what it can do for urban experience, it’s simply not vocalized as coherently due to its inherent lack of organization (which we think is a good thing!). People were coming up to us saying that it was about time this happened–and it was strange that, on an institutional level, no public art program had been implemented to address urban abandonment in our city. So, we think from a street art perspective, the speed at which we were able to address this issue and to act upon this need is what makes street art an incredible possibility and potent tool for guerilla urban regeneration.”

If you’d like more info. click here or here.

More from Armsrock here.

Photos by Just

Via Luzinterruptus

“Police cars everywhere in the Malasaña district. It was surrounded not precisely to shoot a cop film, so has been the situation in the capital lately.

And what was the reason to show these living forces? Well, the 2 de Mayo celebration of course. It is considered a high risk period and has required the setting up of protective fences all around the perimeter of the square. The district’s festival is celebrated here and young people are denied entry if they don’t agree to be searched…

Once recovered from this ‘high risk celebration’, we received the visit from a delegation to assess the sites for the 2016 Olympic Games. We have had the hunch that it must have been rather dangerous, owing to the great number of lot of police cars in the streets in the centre of Madrid.

This stressful coming and going of police cars have made us obsessed with this worrying police car chase, whose symptoms led us to think that any car could be a disguised police car.

We intended to express this paranoia and we made an installation called A lot of Policeman for so few people…, putting on the cars parked around the Dos de Mayo Square our rudimentary blue police lights made with plastic glasses, blue paper and our flashing lights.

We carried out the installation on a total of 50 parked cars, causing no damage whatsoever, on 12 May and there was some expectancy from some lonely nightbirds who waited patiently round the corner for the right moment to take all police lights away for their own use.

And there is not respect for anything nowadays… not even for the living forces…”

Time of installation: 1 hour .
Damages: none
Exhibition time: 1 hour.

Photos taken by Gustavo Sanabria