Beach Blanket Bingo, A Summer Mixer

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin - Squirrel NUT-KIN 2009

Hand-colored linocut mounted on reclaimed lumber on a birch support.
22.25 x 25.5 inches

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin - Old Brown 2009

Hand-colored linocut mounted on reclaimed lumber on a birch support.
24.5 x 39.5 inches

These works will be included in Beach Blanket Bingo, A Summer Mixer at Jonathan LeVine Gallery.

Artists include: Ana Bagayan, Glenn Barr, Ray Caesar, Dave Cooper, Xiaoqing Ding, Meredith Dittmar, David Ellis, Ron English, Natalia Fabia, Korin Faught, AJ Fosik, Andrew Foster, Rick Froberg, Matt Haber, Logan Hicks, Seonna Hong, Alex Hornest (Onesto), Rich Jabocs, Anthony Lister, Jack Long, Cleon Paterson, Scott Radke, Erik Mark Sandberg, SKINNER, ELBOW-TOE, TURF ONE, Nicola Verlato, Adam Wallacavge, Martin Wittfooth, Dan Witz

ELBOW-TOE.COM Is Live

Elbow-toe.com launched this evening. I would encourage you to check out the site and please pass it on to your friends.

Thanks so much!

Catch Up

I am back from London, it was an amazing experience, I was fortunate to meet many wonderful people. The show looked amazing, it was a truly spectacular combination of aesthetics.

I woke this morning to see that an interview that I gave with Arrested Motion is up.

Off to clean studio and get back at it.

Ways of Seeing at BRP

Swoon

Matt Small

Brian Adam Douglas

Ways Of Seeing – An exhibition featuring Swoon, Brian Adam Douglas and Matt Small. Thursday 2nd July – 23rd July 2009

Black Rat Press is delighted to invite you to our next exhibition ‘Ways of Seeing’. The show features works by Swoon, Matt Small and Brian Adam Douglas and explores the different approaches of these three contemporaries to figurative mark making.

Brian Adam Douglas is a Brooklyn based artist who for the past five years has been pasting up his distinctive woodcuts in cities all over the world under the name Elbow-Toe. His work is often grounded in myth, symbolism and poetry and his distinctive style has gained him an avid following of enthusiasts both within street art and the wider art world. Douglas is one of a group of classically trained New York based artists who have chosen the street as the primary place to exhibit their work, finding the immediacy of doing so more liberating than the confines of the traditional gallery system. For ‘Ways of Seeing’ Douglas has created a series of collages portraits. These intricate collages at first glance might be mistaken for paintings given that they have a fluidity rarely seen in collages. Whilst his work has a very definitely unique style it draws on a rich history of figurative painting and has qualities reminiscent of Freud and Bacon.

Swoon is a Brooklyn based artist whose life sized woodcuts can be found on walls in various states of beautiful decay in cities around the world. The scope, variety and ambition of Swoons projects in hugely impressive. Recent projects have involved ‘Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea’, her second solo show with Deitch Projects in New York and her ongoing work with the Braddock Active Arts Project. The Swimming Cities project included seven boats designed and built by Swoon and her crew from discarded materials found in New York dumpsters and then sailed down the Hudson river for 3 weeks stopping along the way to give performances at various locations. The Braddock project is an experiment in inclusive living in the town of Braddock where through creativity and community projects a group of artists led by Swoon hope to revitalize a town struggling with the issues left by the failure of local industry. Swoons gallery installations in which she creates imaginary cityscapes from discarded materials which are inhabited by her life sized figurative wood block prints have gained critical acclaim. Her work is in the permanent collections of a number of public institutions including MOMA, the Brooklyn Museum and the Tate.

Matt Small is an artist whose painting is best understood as an extension of his beliefs and world view. Matt is a passionate believer in social inclusion and that, given the opportunities to be heard and respected, all individuals have something of value to contribute to society. The subject matter of Matts portraits tends to be the marginalized and voiceless in society, those who are socially excluded and often viewed as statistics or pawns in a wider political game as opposed to individuals with the latent potential to contribute and enrich society if only given the opportunity to be heard. By painting portraits of individuals on the outskirts of society, often young black men, Matt encourages us to spend time with people who we may chose to overlook in our daily lives and in doing so forces us to challenge our prejudices and recognize our shared humanity Not content with dealing with such issues only on a conceptual level through his painting, Matt is actively involved in working with the socially excluded. His most recent project ‘Hope in Life’ involved running a series of workshops where mentally ill, homeless and educationally excluded young people came together on a weekly basis alongside established artists to express themselves through painting and music. The project was a huge success culminating in an exhibition at Black Rat Press. The money raised at the show will help make ‘Hope in Life’ an annual project. Matt Small graduated from the Royal College of Art and his unique style of portraiture has gained him a huge following and widespread critical acclaim. He was runner up in the BP portrait award and his work is in numerous collections worldwide including the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Ways of Seeing opens on the evening of July 2nd and invites will be sent out via email to those on the mailing list.

Oedipus copy

elbowtoe
Originally uploaded by jesse_moy

I came across this on flickr this evening. 

This is not a urinal.

Text and photocopy pasted on wall by street artist ELBOW-TOE.

A little explanation of the piece for those that are curious. There is a guy in this neighborhood that goes around with chalk marking spots not as urinals of critiquing graffiti. 

It got me thinking.

This piece is basically a mashup of Duchamp's Fountain and Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe, two pieces that question the relation of signs to their designata. 

Processed

I am busy working on a collage, and as is usually the case my mind is very active as I build layer upon layer of paper very patiently.

As I worked today a conversation I had with another artist in my building kept circulating in my head. The artist mentioned something regarding "now that you have a formula it is pretty much an issue of cranking them out."

This is certainly not the case with these works. I approach every piece as a new challenge, of refinement, expression, of understanding the individual in that moment of time. The actual process of applying the paper is rather straight forward, but every mark is made as though it is the exact mark that is meant to be there, in terms of color, value and the description of its shape. I view these works as operating as both representational works and abstractions. As there is no blending per se, the marks move in and around the forms creating a lattice work of levels, at moments in the process the open areas of color read like precise versions of a Pollock gestural work, and over time develop into forms that on the proper distance congeal to create an arm, a cheekbone, an eye.

The collage works are as much about the process as they are about the finished product. Every mark is a comment on the emotional presence of the model, descriptive as well as gestural.