Street Art Comes to Tarrytown New York

Street Art Comes to Tarrytown

Urban Photography by Charlene Weisler at the Tappan Z Gallery

Special reception May 21, 2010 from 5p-10p

 “I have always been drawn to street art and loved the fact that it could morph on a daily basis. I strive to capture a slice of New York City that will soon disappear” says artist and street art blogger Charlene Weisler. Weisler’s Urban Montage photography reflects the changing images of street art and will be featured at the Tappan Z Gallery in a special one night only “Meet the Artist” reception on Friday, May 21, 2010 from 5p-10p.

As a street art inspired photographer, Weisler searches through peeling, eroding and weathered street art as a template for independent images in photographic collage. "There's a secretive nature to my photographs," she explains, “I capture forms you may not notice when walking by a wall covered with graffiti.” And the landscape changes quickly. Many of her photographs are of images that no longer exist.

Ray Endreny, owner of the Tappan Z Gallery, sees art as a way to bridge the current culture of New York City with historic Hudson Valley communities in Westchester County.  "Charlene Weisler brings an authentic, urban aesthetic to our gallery atmosphere and contributes to the vibrant feel of Main Street in Tarrytown."

Charlene Weisler’s Urban Montage photography exhibition at the gallery features some of her best loved works as well as some never seen before images from her recent portfolio. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Happy Couple” by Charlene Weisler

 

 

 

 

Weisler’s work has been profiled in the New York Sun, in Time Out Magazine and in other publications. "I don't photograph acts of graffiti per se. I am drawn to the decay and chaos and how that becomes part of the art," she said.

Charlene Weisler’s work can be previewed on the Tappan Z Gallery web site (www.tappanzgallery.com) or call the gallery for more information (914-332-8800).  Tappan Z Gallery is located at 51 Main Street, Tarrytown, NY 10591 (across from the fire station).  Metro North Hudson Line trains stop at Tarrytown station, a short walk down the hill from the gallery. 

Love Me

Just like the Papa Loves Baby tags, I am sensing a trend with the tag Love Me. Who is this great desirer of love? What is the backstory?

As always, your comments are welcome.

Toast Girl

I had a solo exhibition in a gallery in Kyoto and went there for the opening. It was my first time in Japan and I loved it! Even though there is not a lot of street art (a very clean series of cities...) there is Manga and all forms of animation.

Just discovered Toast Girl. Here is the recap:
Toast Girl and her two gogo-babies have toured Australia and Japan for years. Hiroe Hama quit her accountantcy job and started to recreate household articles for music shows after studying art. She is fascinated by the sound of toast jumping out of the toaster. Toast Girl designs skater shoes made of hoovers. Her mobile phone consists of an old instrument, tied on her back. At the moment Hiroe is working on her first CD and book publication.

http://www.babelgum.com/4023586/tokyo-toast-girl.html

April Is Poetry Month

Art and poetry are cut from the same cloth. Put a poem in your pocket and help celebrate Poetry month in NYC this April. There will be slams aplenty and where there are slams, there is street art.

What will your poem be? In celebration of National Poetry Month in April, New York City is hosting the 8th annual Poem In Your Pocket day (PIYP) on Thursday April 29, 2010. Be part of the excitement by carrying a poem in your pocket. You can write your own poem or borrow one from your favorite poet; just make sure to share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. Poem in Your Pocket day will offer a series of poetry-inspired events throughout the city, including a full day of open-mic sessions for NYC public school students in Bryant Park. All month long, there will be a series of poetry-inspired events throughout the city. To learn more, visit the Events Calendar.

Get inspired by reading 101 Great American Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)

11 Spring Street, Nolita, New York CIty

11 Spring street was once the hub of downtown street art and, before the building was turned into a luxury condo, the owners of the building offered the space to street artists - both as an inside and exterior exhibition space - for a long weekend event as curated by the Wooster Collective. It was extraordinary event.

This photo to the left is of the exterior before the place was discovered as a street art destination. If you look carefully, you can see where I found my photo "Beware of Dog" which features a small bit of a Faile dog along with other elements.

Beware of Dog by C. Weisler

 

 

The building is now a very clean and upscale condo building. I miss the old 11 Spring site....

5 Pointz in Long Island City Queens

I have written about 5 Pointz in a previous blog but wanted to republish it now. Rumor has it that this extraordinary temple to street art will eventually be sold and made into ... shudder... luxury condos. Is there no place where the incursion of the blight of urban gentrification cannot reach?!

5Pointz in Long Island City, Queens, New York is an extraordinary place where many street and emerging artists have gallery space. It is a series of industrial buildings covered with street art. Here is a short snippet of the ever changing work on the outside of the buildings which was taken in January 2009. But the best way to see this magnificant living art project is in person.

Government Support For Street Art

All street art and graffiti is political - by its very nature these street artists thumb their nose at the law. And so it should be no surprise that in Venezuela artists are creating murals with a political edge. As reported in the New York Times, here is an excerpt -

CARACAS, Venezuela — Of all the murals and graffiti that adorn this anarchic city’s trash-strewn center, one creation by the street artist Carlos Zerpa fills him with special pride: a stenciled reinterpretation of Caravaggio’s “David with the Head of Goliath,” in which a warrior grasps the severed head of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The government, which supports Mr. Zerpa’s creations and the work of many other street artists, is increasingly making them a central element of its promotion of a state ideology. Government-financed brigades of graffiti artists and muralists are blanketing this city’s walls with politicized images, ranging from crude, graffiti-tagged slogans to bold, colorful works of graphic art.

Street artists here, who largely differentiate themselves from the city’s hordes of graffiti taggers, say the slow-burning chaos that increasingly characterizes Caracas makes it an ideal place for them to ply their trade. “There’s a great deal of freedom here to do what we want,” said Yaneth Rivas, 27, a member of the same street-art brigade as Mr. Zerpa, called the Communications Liberation Army. Her work, mainly posters placed at bus stops, is more nuanced than Mr. Zerpa’s. She explores, for instance, the polarization of Venezuelan society in one image showing two policemen from different districts of Caracas pointing guns at each other.

Not everyone putting up images on walls here draws support from the government. Saúl Guerrero, a stencil painter who ranks among the city’s most prolific street artists, has painted dozens of melancholic portraits of people around the eastern districts of Caracas, signing them with the nom-de-plume “Ergo.”

“We’re not looking for immortality with our work,” she said. “Our gallery is the street, and that means we have to hope our images spur passers-by to think a little before they disappear.”

Charlene Weisler - Urban Montage Movie

Here is an incredible movie of my Urban Montage photography created by the incredible MaryJane Harris. It takes a minute or so to load. Enjoy!

Exit Through The Gift Shop - Banksy Movie Gets Reviewed

There was a street art movie that was quietly released at Sundance last year which had a huge following. It called "Exit Through the Gift Shop" and was the "hot ticket to get" at the festival. The film is about the elusive street artist Banksy. I was not at Sundance but was curious about the movie. So now the movie has just been released and here is a review by Associated Press Jake Cole:

"Exit Through the Gift Shop" guides you through the world of street art before showing you the door, leaving you — as all thought-provoking graffiti does — amused, thrilled, bewildered and a little confused about the nature of art.

The film is a curiosity. It's both an attempted documentary of an artistic movement and a bemused examination about why the movie failed in that mission. It was made by the renown British graffiti artist known as Banksy, whose creations appear secretly overnight on random walls the world over.

Banksy's works often suggest a wry comment on pop culture: a mural of Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta from "Pulp Fiction" holding bananas rather than guns; a painting on the West Bank barrier of a girl pulled upward by balloons; British pound notes with Princess Diana's head replacing the Queen's.

Aside from apparently guiding the movie behind the camera, Banksy occasionally appears in front of it, too. Lounging leisurely in a chair, he's hooded and shrouded in shadow, his voice altered. He introduces the film, apologizing that it's "not `Gone With the Wind,'" but that he thinks there may be "a moral in there somewhere."

The central figure of the movie isn't Banksy, but an enthusiastic, mutton-chopped Frenchman named Thierry Guetta. A celebrity-obsessed Los Angeles family man ("C'est Shaq," he exclaims), Guetta obsessively videotapes his life. When Guetta comes in contact with street artists like Invader and Shepard Fairey, he quickly ingratiates himself to them and becomes the artists' de facto documentarian. "The man who would film anything had stumbled into an underground world," intones the film's narrator, the Welsh actor Rhys Ifans.

Guetta knows little about art or even filmmaking, but he's game. He excitedly follows these artists (whose works now can fetch tens of thousands of dollars at auction) as they, like burglars, scramble across rooftops at night. As time goes by, Guetta amasses a great library of footage. Much of it is riveting — a rare window into people who spend a lot of energy keeping their identities secret and obscuring their methods.

When fame finds Banksy and the other graffiti artists, they urge Guetta to assemble his documentary. He responds with a 90-minute movie, "Life Remote Control," a plotless, almost demented mess. Realizing that they had entrusted the wrong person — "someone with mental problems with a camera," says Banksy — Banksy decides to take the reins, and "Exit Through the Gift Shop" is the result. There's a twist, though. While Banksy is sifting through the wreckage, he suggests Guetta try creating street art, himself — thereby unwittingly creating a monster.

In Los Angeles, Guetta remakes himself as "Mister Brainwash" and — with the help of a large staff and notices from Banksy and Fairey — fixes up an extravagant hit debut show. The lavish attention he gets and the prices paid for his derivative, manufactured paintings, astonishes Banksy and the rest. They are left shaking their heads at this counterfeit "overnight artist." Looking for a lesson, Banksy shrugs, "Maybe it means art is a bit of a joke."

It's a deflating, albeit sensible conclusion, especially when it comes at the heels of a movie that celebrates art's inventiveness. It's also fitting: One of Banksy's most famous pranks was stealthily hanging his own works in the Louvre.

"Exit Through the Gift Shop" begins with a beautiful montage of street artists at work, set to Richard Hawley's "Tonight the Streets Are Ours." As fascinating a story as Guetta's is, one can't help but wish street art could have gotten the documentary it deserved.

"Exit Through the Gift Shop," a Producers Distribution Agency release, is rated R for some language. Running time: 87 minutes. Three stars out of four.

A Sociologist's Look At Graffiti

I don't read a lot of books and I am not sure about this one but the subject certainly grabs me. The new book in question is called Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York's Urban Underground (Alternative Criminology) by Gregory Snyder through the New York University Press.

Author Gregory Snyder is a Baruch College sociologist and has done years of research on the subject, hanging out with graffiti writers, earning their trust and conducting scores of interviews. From what I can glean from the NY Times review, Synder says that graffiti writers cannot be understood merely as practitioners of vandalism and social disorder, but also as members of a diverse subculture who, in many cases, have used their experiences to build legitimate careers. He continues that graffiti culture has, in some ways, been uniquely democratic. “What is lost sometimes in the cacophony of the debate over whether graffiti is art or vandalism is that when it’s art, it is free art,” he writes. “You don’t need money, or special knowledge, or the right outfit, or a car, or an ID to see it. This is why the graffiti subculture has inspired such a diversity of young people.”

So far this is nothing that I haven't read elsewhere.

“I’m not trying to make an argument that graffiti is art and not vandalism,” Professor Snyder said in a phone interview. “I hope I’ve made it clear that it’s both.”

Errrr okay.....

Synder offers the point that graffiti does not tend to be focused in poor neighborhoods with high rates of violent crime. Graffiti writers write in order to get fame and respect for their deeds, and therefore they write in places where their work is more likely to be seen by their intended demographic. It is not the amount of disorder that determines a good spot to write graffiti, but the number of potential viewers and the unlikelihood that the graffiti will be painted over. These spots tends to be where young people from all over the city are likely to congregate, and thus the East Village, the Lower East Side, and SoHo are the places where most of the illegal New York City graffiti can be found. These are not poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods. Indeed, he adds, “Despite all of the negativity associated with graffiti, it remains one of SoHo’s selling points, literally.”

I am not sure that I agree with all of this. I think the type of graffiti differs by neighborhood. Wheatpaste, stickers and stencil are found in more "upscale" neigborhoods like Soho, Dumbo, Williamsburg while aerosol and large murals are more prevalent in poorer neighborhoods. And I for one know that graffiti is constantly being destroyed by either being painted over or torn down - often in hours of going up. I don't think it is any gentrifying neighborhoods "selling points" and have actually seen, to my dismay, that as neighborhoods gentrify, the first thing that you see disappear is street art.

The NY Times link to the book review is: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/a-new-look-at-graffiti-writers-lives/?partner=rss&emc=rss

PS. Ironically, the publisher, New York University Press is part of NYU. NYU is a behemoth institution that has zero consideration for the livability of Greenwich Village.