One of our favourite Perth lads, The Yok and Singaporean artist Sheryo both base themselves in New York City these days – which meant it was just a hop skip and a jump for then to head down to Mexico for a bit of a paint.
From Sheryo -
“Hello! The Yok and I just got back from a 2mths trip to Mexico where we painted for a festival, organised a Drink and Ink night. ( tattoo night ) and got in some surfing time.
The original sketches are available on heavyweight art paper or straight from the sketch book, please contact me for details if you are interested.”
Watch a fun video of the the first half of the trip here:
These guys have also done some amazing work at 5 Pointz and in Bushwick in the past week or two, really grand stuff.
Check out all the pics of their work in Mexico below, and get in quick if you want to buy any of them! Well be catching up with this pair when we hit NYC next month, so keep an eye out for more grandness to come!
Following on from the successful first exhibition, ‘Don’t Grow Old It’s a Trap’, the people behind the Fuck You / I Am project showcase a photographic journey entitled ‘The Future Just Happened.’ A display of works from Sydney-based photographer Sam Stephenson, explore the subculture of DIY tattoos, via raw black and white imagery. The confronting images peep the audience inside the bedrooms, people and paraphernalia that exist in the underground world of inking yourself or others via crude, often hand made, implements. There is a youthful energy and humour in the works whose subjects are as intriguing as the tattoos themselves.
Returning to Melbourne for a second time, Mark Bode has been a hell busy man since his last trip down here for his successful solo show at House Of Bricks. Now, he returns with a spin on the Australian culture, for his whimsically cool show “Ned Kelly Maps & Other Outback Stories” …
“In the graffiti pantheon, Mark Bode is one of the living gods.
Son of the iconoclastic New York underground comic book artist Vaughn Bode. A prolific and charismatic artist in the 70’s who universe of characters and stories resonated so strongly with rebellious mentality of the burgeoning hip-hop and graffiti scene that they we’re adopted by the earliest graffiti artists, becoming the first illustrated characters to appear in graffiti. Soon the Bode style of illustration became as ubiquitous to the development of graffiti as wild-style.
As the inheritor to this global movement Mark Bode spent his formative years in the surreal world of comic book, illustration and fantasy artists. Raised in New York with the familiar work of his father speeding past him on the subway and painted on walls throughout the city, Mark also soon became actively involved in the graffiti scene himself and is today one of the worlds most respected graffiti artists.
Mark is a comic book writer and artist, a tattooist and a graffiti artist, he has expanded on his fathers legacy and continues to this day to act as the guardian of the universe, overseeing it’s development with projects throughout the world.
Mark is presenting new body of work focused on the life and crimes of the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.
During a road trip to Sydney earlier this year and an impromptu stop at Glenrowan, Mark was introduced to the story of Ned Kelly who has since become a regular addition to his universe. In this show Mark is presenting a series of sketches and original works on Australian road maps featuring the Kelly Gang and a Bode interpretation of their universe which in his opinion deserves further development in the global consciousness.
This exhibition is only up for one weekend from the 16th of November until 18th and is being presented at a Backwoods pop up space, on 143 Johnston Street, Collingwood.”
We interviewed Mark last time he was down in February, and we’d heard he was going to be making another trip down this way – we loved his show at HoB and this one we’re sure will be no exception. We’d heard that this was going to be at House Of Bricks or Backwoods, but we just received an email saying that it is now going to be at a special popup space on Johnston st in Collingwood – so head down there to check it all out this Friday – you wont be disappointed.
Who: Mark Bode What: Ned Kelly Maps & Other outback Stories Where: Backwoods Gallery POP UP SPACE – 143 Johnston St, Collingwood When: Friday 16th november from 6pm til 9pm, show runs until 18th November only.
One of our favourite shows we’ve been to this year was Ink Dots Black Spots – so much to see, so much damn fine art in print form. Spread over two venues, it was a jam packed with punters and purveyors.
When we saw last week that it was heading up to Sydney, we couldn’t be happier – a chance for everyone up there to see the great shit hat has come out of all these artists, who, themselves, are spread out over a huge number of Melbourne tattoo and art studios.
"In its inaugural year this exhibition was born from the idea to share artwork from numerous artists to their fans & the public, whilst contributing to those of us who support the fight against cancer. Each sale will add to our total donation goal for Cancel Council Victoria. Info at www.inkdotsblackspots.com
Featuring 62 limited edition artworks screen printed in editions of 20"
Who: Adrian Krygsman, Alex Rusty Cairns, All One, Alvaro Flores, Amy Duncan, Andrea Daniel, Andrew McLeod, Ben O’Grady, Brett Hayes, Brian Graydon, Bugsy, Caleb Walmsley, Capilli Tupou, Charley Gerardin, Craig Deuce, Dave McAleese, Dave Riley, Marshall, Matt Deverson, Matt Wisdom, Nathan Puata, Nick Edwards, Nick Rutherford, O.T, Owen Williams, Ozzy, Rosa Hardy, Rudie, Sean Jackson, Simplesime, Teniele Sadd, William Yoneyama, Zach Hart, Zoe Dennis, Dean Sacred, Donny Dont, Evan Griffiths, Garth Neale, Gary Krygsman, Geordie Cole, Gred Heasly, Jane Laver, Jess Swaffer, Josh Piddock, Josh Roelink, Julian Fletcher, Lee Stain, Mark Lording, Mark Sender, Mark Tumaru What: Ink Dots Black Spots group show When: (Tonight!) Wednesday, October 31st from 6pm til 9pm Where: The Tate, 345 Glebe Pt Rd, Glebe, Sydney
What a spectacle it was last week down at the Order Of Melbourne - the first Semi Final of Secret Walls Melbourne, between Steve Cross and Chris Hancock was a smash, the room was full to bursting and there was a massive crowd.
It was a well waged battle, but in the end, Hancock came out victorious, with Steve Cross winning the crowd vote, and Hancock taking both the judges votes.
When we think of art that leaves us peering into another world and contemplating the multiverse, there is one artist we invariably think of – Itch.
Massively multitalented, and known throughout for his perception challenging, colourful and highly technically adept aerosol work (both solo and as a part of the AWOL crew), Itch is, without a doubt, one of Australias best. This madly talented aerosol artist, musician and tattooist will be having a solo show at RTIST Gallery this week – it’s going to be a big one.
“Ever seen 4D artwork before? Do not miss one of the most mind bending exhibits ever seen …
“In the very corners of the city, amongst the hidden crevasses and corridors traversing Melbourne, the Itch resides. With pencil welded in his crooked hand, he suckles spilt energy drinks from the floors of convenience stores and the dew from pre-dawn flora, only halting in his journey through the Metropolis to feed his ravenous addiction to aerosol solvents … “
Artist, tattooist, musician and animator – Itch is a name that has echoed throughout the streets of Australia since 1998. With his upcoming solo show at RTIST Gallery, Multiple Reality Disorder, Itch will coalesce over a decade and a half of thought, talent and theory. Having exhibited and displayed work across Australia, at galleries and venues such as NGV Studio, Mays Lane, Outpost, China Heights and a multitude of others, Itch is no stranger to the gallery setting. As a festival mainstay, his art has also adorned a huge array of banners and installations, most particularly at the annual Rainbow Serpent festival, and his many live art performances at events such as Tiger Translate, Secret Walls and Red Bull Wreckers have been witnessed by thousands. From this wealth of experience and unmitigated passion, Itch has produced a new, excitingly quixotic body of work.
A transcendent exhibition, Multiple Reality Disorder will leave both your vision, and your mind, spieling towards the hidden dimensions that exist apart from this world – leading you on a movable feast of exploration and discovery. Guided by an inner light, each work will transcend in form as your eyes slowly reveal the beauty within the mundane.
Crossing genres with ease, all is not as it may first appear within Itchs work – characters and forms, scenery and fauna are mutable and guised, their true visages revealed only by the multicoloured separation of photons. Psychedelic, graffiti and fine art aesthetics are imbued with illusion, removing you from the monotonal world that some believe we inhabit – and yet Itchs sense of levity and humour pervade it all, lightening the heavy streams of thought that emerge.
This, is Multiple Reality Disorder – and your journey has already begun …
“Everything growing apart, together. Onwards and outwards, the eternal dance of duality mocks constructs within time and space – its infinite, illusory form folds back upon itself as the old illusions form compost for exciting new modalities of thought. In time, these forms will calcify and rot, whence dreadlocked grandmothers begin to pull faded “Mayan 2012″ t-shirts from op shop bins …”
Itch also recently did a mad assed video for Scribe Apparel, check it out …
That’s why we’re excited – that, and oh so many more reasons. We’ve seen some of the artwork, and we know what’s ahead, and lets just say its going to blow your fkn brain …
Who: Bryan Itch What: Multiple Reality Disorder
Where: RTIST Gallery, 29 St Edmonds Rd, Prahran, VIC When: Friday September 15th from 6pm til 9pm, show runs until
The other week we had the absolute privilege to witness over 14 tattoo studios and 50 artists get together for the amazing Ink Dots Black Spots exhibition.
Spread over two venues, the Vic and the Aviary, the opening night was absolutely packed, and it wasn’t a surprise – the calibre of the art on display was second to none.
Check out all the photos from the opening below …
Check out the Ink Dots Black Spots website for all the info on the artists involved!
Over fifty artists from across 15 tattoo studios? Yes, you heard it right. Plus, it’s all for charity – this is big, this is Ink Dots Black Spots.
"In its inaugural year this exhibition was born from the idea to share artwork from numerous artists to their fans & the public, whilst contributing to those of us who support the fight against cancer. Each sale will add to our total donation goal for Cancer Council Victoria."
SimpleSime and Darngerfork are behind this behemoth, and there will also be over 20 limited edition prints available courtesy of the guys from Dangerfork – what more could you want??
Check out a great interview with SimpleSime, the man behind the show, over at Safehouse!
Who: Over 50 artists from across Melbourne! Check them all out here! What: Ink Dot Black Spots group show Where: The Vic, 281 Victoria St, Abbotsford, Melbourne When: Show opens Thursday 16th August from 7pm til late.
There’s been a couple of lowbrow group shows across the country lately – diverse artists banding together to show work that doesn’t follow the trends of the contemporary.
Next up in this vein, is a group show from a bunch of Melbourne artists (and two from Perth!) who will be displaying their work at the iconic Revolver.
"Lowbrow as an art form was originally named so because it was commonly seen as uninterested, uninvolved, & uneducated. It was no more than easily dismissible kitsch, & only a delinquent of cheap tastes would ever find pleasure in such a piece.
Welcome delinquents, this show is for you."
We love seeing shows at Revolver. Their Seasons of Change ones are great, and we love that they continue to advocate up coming artists in a great space that gets a lot of visibility (except maybe on Sunday mornings ha ha) for them! Head down there tomorrow night to check it all out.
Who: Josh Kingsley McKenzie, Ran Maclurkin, Reece Dillon, Spaz, Trubble Sum, Clair Valerie Breyley, Lady Bananas VS Tomohawk (BANANAHAWK), CuRCis & more to be announced! What: Lowlife group show Where: Revolver Upstairs, When: Wednesday 25th July from 6pm til 11pm
I was just about to do an intro saying that Low Brow is a pretty hard thing to define these days, and then I just realised the the copy for the show says it better than I can right now in my brain dead, night before returning to work with a cramped hand from over-drawing and preparing for our group show this week – (shits getting hectic)… but, I digress … where was I? Ah yeah …
"Lowbrow art can be many things, drawing, painting, sculpture, digital or street art but one thing is for sure, it’s always fun! Taking inspiration from popular and skate culture, kitsch nostalgia, tattoo art, comics, story book illustration and all things cool, Lowbrow art is a movement in which we can all find something to make us smile or maybe even cringe.
Brisbane Lowbrow is a group exhibition that celebrates and appreciates the humour and wistfulness of Lowbrow illustration. This exhibition will display 13 of the best emerging artists working in the Lowbrow sphere!"
That pretty much sums up my favourite form of art – the kind that is just fkn fun, which is what this show looks to be, and what we’d be having if we were up in Brissy this Thursday!
Who: Lucinda Wolber, Georg, Nick Drake, Brent Wilson, Travis D Hendrix, Nathan Smith, John Patterson, Tamara Nicholson, Charly Design, Raven Hodgsen, Megan Starr-Thomas, Gabriella Szableweska, Ellie Anderson What: Brisbane Low Brow Where: Bleeding Hearts Gallery, 166 Ann St, Brisbane When: Exhibition opening Thursday the 19th of July from 5pm, and will show through until Monday the 30th of July.
Check out the facebook event page and the Bleeding Heart Gallery website for more info.
Rightio Melbourne, it’s back again – Secret Walls Round #2 hits Order of Melbourne on Wednesday night!
After last months round between Reliable and Hancock, in which Hancock came out victorious and hot on the tail of the first round of Sydney Secret Walls, Conrad Bizjak and Steve Cross will face off to see who heads into the next round!
It’ll be a really close one again, because knowing both of these artists work really well, they are both set to bring their best to the fore in one of the hottest live art battle series on the planet!
We’ll be there once again, getting as much coverage as we can and reporting back on the results – hope to see all you ‘burn city crew there!
Who: Conrad Bizjak vs Steve Cross What: Secret Walls Melbourne Round #2 Where: Order of Melbourne, Level 2, 401 Swanston St, Melbourne When: Wednesday 27th June, doors open 6:30pm, battle starts 8:30 sharp!
Having not been too familiar with Sam Hillcoat before we saw this flyer, we went off and did a bit of research and look around … and, must say, pretty impressed by the small portion of what we saw.
Having worked in Brisbane for ten years as a street artist and tattooist, a lot of his work is reminiscent of traditional Japanese styled work, but with a very prominent "modern" lilt to it, and its a really freszh take on an old style, rendering it into something quite different.
"The exhibition, Sam’s first solo show, features striking new works on canvas using oil, acrylics and aerosol. With several successful group shows under his belt and nonstop tattoo and canvas commissions, Sam has had to lock himself away and surrender much of this precious income to prepare his prolific new body of work.
Sam says he has adopted a fresh stylistic approach for this exhibition, “my new work is a hybrid of different styles. I like to take the raw expression of street art and the clandestine styles of modern and traditional tattoo design out of their natural environments. For the first time in years I have been able to flesh out all these ideas I have been developing, without having to meet anyone else’s expectations or specifications. I am excited to unveil this new style, which I feel is totally my own.”
In the last 10 years street art and tattooing has seen a surge in interest from the public and broader art world. While Sam has benefited professionally from this trend, this exhibition sees him moving away from the machine and spray can, and transforming his love of urban cultures into a fine art. Much of Sam’s new work is reminiscent of traditional Japanese art and tattoo (irezumi) with bold, colourful graffiti aesthetics. His duel occupations as a tattoo and aerosol artist have led him to developing this unique crossover style that is hugely appealing to fans of tattoo, street and contemporary fine art.
The Quiet Storm exhibition offers the pleasures of permanent ink, without the pain, the vibrancy of street art, without the legalities. It is an exhibition of exceptional artistry from a young, highly sought after tattoo and street artist with fresh, distinctive brushwork."
This coming solo show at Jugglers Artspace on Friday night will be the first solo show from the artist, and we hope it is only the first of many.
Nice work once again from the crew at Jugglers and Crush City for putting this one on!
Who: Sam Hillcoat What: The Quiet Storm debut solo show Where: Jugglers Artspace, 103 Brunswick Street Fortitude Valley, QLD When: Show opens Friday 22nd June from 6pm and runs til Saturday 23d June – 1 -5pm (one day only!)
Well, this is one of those rare occasions where we bend the rules slightly on our editorial filter and post up a photographic exhibition – because Nicole Reed isn’t your every day, ordinary photographer. I mean, just check out these awesome shots from the Order Of MelbourneSecret Wars paint up that put ours to shame; now that’s photography.
Having worked documenting urban culture around Australia, and internationally, for many years, Nicole Reed has snapped shots of a huge amount of cool shit. Having her hand in everything from working with T-world on the grand photo display of designers at last years NEXT at the Outpost Project, and running shoots with clients such as Wooden Toy, Inked, COP magazine (who ran a cool interview with her), Desktop and The Age, she has an eye for all that is street and cultural.
Head down to the Vic in Richmond tonight to see her latest personal photo-art display, "In Between" – if you haven’t seen her work before, check out A Shot Away, you it may very well look pretty familiar …
Who: Nicole Reed What: In Between photographic exhibition Where:The Vic Bar, 281 Victoria Street, Melbourne, VIC When: Show opens tonight from 5pm til 12pm! With tunes, drinks and more .. not sure how long it runs for, but probably a few weeks!
Chaz Bojorquez is a man in possession of a lifelong wander lust , traversing the globe in search of identity, culture and the experiences that lay within.
Having started writing and placing marks upon walls since the 1960’s, Chaz not only created his own signature style, but is also one of the founders of modern graffiti. With a passion and hunger to discover all he could about the world he lives within, as well as his own sense of personal identity, his work spurred on a movement that would eventually evolve into the Los Angeles ‘Cholo’ hand style.
When we caught up with Chaz, at this years Carbon Festival, he was animated and alive, relishing the surroundings of both his own solo show, as well as the Carbon event itself. When we asked what he thought of his Australian experience thus far, he replied with as much animation as he appeared.
“I’ve had a fascination with Australia since I was kid. I had friends and family who migrated to Australia in the 60’s who they’d disappear down to this place, before it was called Down Under or anything like that.”
“I also always had a wander lust,” he continued. “I went to Mexico by myself when I was 16. I was born in LA, but my grandparents had emigrated to Tijuana, so I used to spend a lot of time in Tijuana … which isn’t really Mexico.”
This journeying in his youth had a direct effect on the path that his life would lead. As a third generation Chicano, his family re-migrated back down to Tijuana and was immersed in its culture vibrancy, which included trips with his grandmother to the regular bullfights. From there, his experiences led him to seeking out new environments and cultures from which to draw inspiration, which, in turn, lead to the discovery of his own roots.
“I started finding my own culture through other cultures,” he said enthusiastically. “I didn’t discover other cultures like a tourist does – Samoan culture, Fijian or New Zealand Maori culture. I found families, I found people – and I realised that even though the accents are different, we all make fun of the same things.”
Eager to learn and experience as much as he could about the world, Chaz travelled to Caledonia, the Southern islands, Papua New Guinea, and Bougainville and other areas in the South Pacific. He tells us that at this point in his life, he felt as though he was truly multicultural, that he knew the corners of the world. He began to reflect inwardly, analysing his own identity, and the more he did so the more it became evident that the cultures he had witnessed were not his own.
“I started hurting and aching, and asking, who am I?” he lamented. “I had to rediscover my own heritage. Which part of is Chicano? Which part was American Mexican?”
The quest to identify himself with his own culture lead to to the walls of Los Angeles. In an attempt to express himself and discover meaning in what he did as an artist, and who he was, he threw himself into the world of art and graffiti with a passion that he felt he had only previously scratched the surface of.
“Even though I had been doing graffiti since ‘69, that was when I decided to really prove it, and start making graffiti as art. I started out as a tagger. People were always saying ‘It’s not art, its trash!“
“Yeah I’m a writer. I’m a tagger. That’s who I am, and I’m proud of it,” he proclaimed passionately. ‘You gotta be who you are. You gotta tell the truth, because in the long run, that’s all you’re gonna have, and you have to build from that truth. I could only build from the foundations that I created.”
Chaz sees graffiti as communication between people – for urban youth, in particular – but he also views it as a thing of absolute beauty and strength. He wanted to prove this to the world, to create a painting to show the people around him, and indeed, the world, graffiti meant to him. Having witness first hand the early New York style, he realised that at that time it was an entirely East Coast style and entity, as, even then, there was form of isolation between the East Coast and West Coast. In order, however, to show people the beauty and strength in the way he expressed himself, he had to take a different tack.
“I didn’t actually do my first painting until 1981”, he continued, “but I had all this dialog. There were only a few people who knew how beautiful graffiti was, ahow it meant so much, how it was a dialog.”
“So I had to go into painting to prove it, to get the top down and bottom up credibility from the roots of the streets, because real graffiti is in the streets. It’s on the wall. You have to put minimum of ten years into the streets before you can call yourself a writer. It weeds out the toys, the players, the posers, the fakers; it weeds all of them out, and you end up with those who have real passion,” he declared.
Through his many days and nights spent painting on the streets of L.A., Chaz finally bega to feel as though he had discovered his identity. As an individual who has always been a dreamer, he often saw things where other people didn’t see them. He saw, quite early on, and before many others, that graffiti was important, that graffiti it was a language, and that it was a history to be celebrated.
When we asked Chaz about how it felt, to know that what he had dreamed of back then, that the ubiquity and acceptance of graffiti in popular society is slowly beginning to permeate our cultures, that people all across the world now see his work and his place within that history, he, with all humility, put it down to luck. Little by little from his experiences he learnt what exactly what it was that he was not, and after heading to New York and spending time with Dondi White and Keith Haring, he could see that he was, most simply, Cholo.
At this point in time, Chaz also began to fall in love with the ancient art of Calligraphy. It was his respect and appreciation of Asian artwork and illustration, as well as other traditional fonts, that involved intricate flowing letterforms which also lent themselves to developing his beautiful and unique script.
“I could see the influence of the letters, I could see the image and the letter shapes actually bouncing off each other. I could describe what it was doing to the birds, and the wings looked like the letters,” he expressed, “I started to see combinations, started to see images – that calligraphy was all about imagery.’”
Chaz felt at that point that he knew almost nothing about Cholo graffiti; only that it was made up of symbols, and he pondered upon how he could make it into a language that he himself could understand. He decided to begin a study of language itself, and spent a lot of time looking at these ancient forms of script, as well as collecting newspapers from all over the world in order to study the way in which themselves were presented. That newspapers also held a common thread, a common form of communication within the way in which they are presented. Messages laid out in blocks of text, fonts and images.
He also spoke to old time Cholos in LA, men who had seen the passing of years and who held the traditions of their people in their hearts. He asked why they had chosen Old English as their style, why it was so ubiquitous in their communication, and they had remarked that it was because Old English was made from the most prestigious of letters, “it’s on your birth certificate, on your death certificate, it’s used for your graduation…” and that it was this, and familiarly enough, the influence of growing up reading comic books, that led to the creation of the old Cholo style.
As this quest for identity began to form a cohesion around him, Chaz began to ruminate on the almost imperceptible disappearance of the old Cholo-style writing from around the LA neighbourhoods, and the beauty of the Gothic and Old English fonts amongst the Chicano culture. It was then, when he began to reflect his own inward discoveries outwards to the world via both writing upon the walls as well as his work in the galleries, that he evolved his unique interpretation of a letterform; one that he felt best represented his people.
As he did so, he remembered feeling as if nobody really respected his work, or his letters, and asked himself, “How can I respect my own culture? How can truly make graffiti important enough that people can understand it?”
So he continued to focus on creating, drawing and writing it out, using “… beautiful, clean, straight lines. A line to a line. Centre to centre. Flush right, flush left,” he described. “Making the whole unity of the letters become poetic. To find rhymes reasons and echoes in the entirety, and then to try to make something of beauty, but still something that is hard, and sharp…”
When he first took his paintings to Chicano galleries in East L.A, Chaz remembers the general dismissal of his work. At the time, the resounding response was that that Chicano was all about “family, religion, border issues, immigration, suppression…” and that his “bad boy art” and reinterpretations and evolution of the letters of his culture would undermine the subjects that were deemed most important.
Finally, tells us, and thankfully, he was embraced by other artists who saw his work as new and invigorating, and met such luminaries as Robert Williams and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, who both helped Chaz to put on his very first show. His work was displayed alongside tattoo tribal artists, artists who worked on surfboards, cartoonists and hot rodders and it was through that show, and many more in future years, that he discovered that that the differences between their various cultures and styles had begun to fade away.
“We all showed together, and we discovered that we all had the same lines. We had the same stroke – the West Coast stroke.”
From there, one of the many epiphanies in his life occurred. He discovered that he was a blend, that something else, something new, something distinct was being created. Whereas that before, he had thought that the artists and their work had seemed to be separate, but that things had begun to coalesce
Whereas before, things had seemed to be quite separate, he came to the understanding that the communication and languages expressed by the artists and creative individuals around him had begun to coalesce – that they were all inherently drawing from the same well springs of influence. Their city, their culture. Their home – their place.
Speaking to Chaz Bojorquez was a profound experience; he is a man who has carefully explored the world and the treasures of human culture. By drawing on the echos of the past and the traditions of old, he has created his own sense of identity and style through a belief that within life you must stay true to yourself, that great things will come from building upon your own foundations. Chazs dream of transforming something that was forsaken as garbage and wilful vandalism into something that sought – no, demanded – importance has bloomed into the multiple facets of abstracted acceptance in our modern lives. His style is poetic and speaks in the hidden language of philosophy; his art is beauty, strength and identity.
From his signature Señor Suerte, one of the first true icons of graffiti created on the streets, now found tattooed on thousands of individuals, to his letters and artwork both inside and outside of the gallery, Chaz has created a legacy, one that we have no doubt will continue to stand the test of time. His hard work, perseverance and explorations have forever enshrined him as a true pioneer – not only of the LA street style, but of a beautiful, all encompassing, global graffiti culture.
Last year, the team behind Carbon Festival bought out the legendary Futura to visit, and this year, they’ve kept the bar just as high by featuring the godfather of all that is cholo art, Chaz Bojorquez.
Whether you know it or not, but you’ve seen this mans work – or, you’ve seen the many many adaptations of his iconic pieces throughout popular culture – that stylised skull with the hat on its head? That’s pure Bojorquez. His letterforms have also become the basis for many varying styles, and you can see his influences pervading street culture of all forms.
This is one of those artists whose unique style has inspired, innovated and dominated across the decades, and in this coming show, you have the chance to see it for yourself for the first time in Australia.
"Carbon Festival in conjunction with the National Gallery of Victoria presents Chaz Bojorquez ‘LA Handstyles’. The show will feature a new body of work from the legendary Godfather of Cholo graffiti. Bojorquez has been practising typographic graffiti since the late 60′s, fusing the gang scripts of Mexican-American’s living in LA with the timeless art of Eastern calligraphy he creates beautiful works that are equally delicate as they are threatening.
A true pioneer, his influence on popular culture can not be understated. Bojorquez’s letter forms and their legacies can be found everywhere from skate culture, graffiti, contemporary design, as well as across the bodies of thousands of men in prison who’ve inked his works on their skin permanently as protective charms.
Bojorquez’s work has been collected by many major institutions the world over, most recently he has contributed work to the Smithsonian, and was a featured artist in LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s seminal street art exhibition ‘Art in the Streets’. This is the artist’s first visit to Australia, and Carbon is proud to be a collaborator in this groundbreaking event."
Seriously an un-missable exhibition, alongside all the other awesome shit that is going on over the weekend – crazy!!
Who: Chaz Bojorquez What: LA Handstyles solo show Where: NGV Studio, The Atrium, Federation Square When: Show opens 4pm, Saturday 28th April, til 7pm, and runs til May 5th.
Coming to you from the residence formerly occupied by the much missed At Large, NiceCat is a more than worthy successor to the Northcote underground art crown. We headed down to the newly minted establishment the other week to partake in their beautifully priced Montana paint.
While we were there we got to have a good chat, and take a look at one of the previous shows, and hear a bit about the plans for the place – and it sounds pretty promising! Not only will they be selling paint up in the north (at good hours, they’re open from 4pm til 8pm every night!), but they have a whole range of shows that are sure to be grand.
Tonight, however, they have the opening of the Dredded Malice – featuring work from artist and tattooist Dred, aka Malice. Touting the show as a "transformation of tattoos and aerosol" – which looks pretty cool.
Nice to see things firing back up in Northcote – so head down to the show tonight to check it all out.
Who: Dred aka Malice What: The Dredded Malice solo show Where: Nicecat gallery & store, 208 High Street, Northcote When: Show opens Friday 13th April from 7pm til late, and runs until the 27th April.
Invurt webzine provides information on AustralAsian street, urban, illustrative, graffiti and other genre defying, nu-contemporary art to readers around the world. It specialises in events and artists who are working, displaying and visiting Australasia – particularly with a focus on exhibitions, live art and other events the artists are partaking in.
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