INVURT

Another busy week comes to an end, and all of us here are full steam ahead with a bunch of projects and fun shit. Busy busy busy, cool cool cool.

We have a great art session happening this weekend in Perth, with Dibs, ToniTone, Poise, Deej, NVS and Suloh putting some licks of paint up on a dance studio. Makatron and Gore are painting a wall across the road from our studios at the moment, and in a few short weeks we’ll be transforming the inside of the whole Rival Revolution studios complex with the help of a lot of talented people … lots of cool shots and video to come for sure.

So its still full steam ahead on everything … the new site design is still coming along steadily (when I have time to work on it … sorry, spare time? What? When?) but we’ve now fully assembled our core team and are raring to go – maybe its time we did introductions?

Starma – is our new event and general office manager, I’ll be palming all that kind of shit off to him, he’s much better at it than I am.
FacieB – is one of our new writers, and she’ll also be working closely on the first of our side projects that we’ll be announcing pretty soon ..
Leah – another of our writer extraordinaires, she’s already done a bunch of pieces, and we love her laid back style!
Peach – is the creative director of .. yep, another side project we’re setting up that! She’s also a generally amazing office assistant.
Crutch (Lisa) has just come on board this week to work on our NZ section – that’ll all be starting up next week, hopefully!
Mel – will be helping us out occasionally with a bit of writing and photography in amongst her work with her Baby Trees project
Lara – is our new official Melbourne event photographer, so expect a bunch of shots from around here real soon (if anyone interested in coming on board for other cities,  just let us know!)

I mostly wanted to introduce them as a thankyou for all the hard work they’ve put in so far, and all the hard work that’s soon to come. It’s a great team, with an incredible amount of passion and talent (and patience with me), and I’m really stoked to be working with all of them – please make them all feel welcome!

Anyways! Enough of all that bullshit from me – here’s the wrap!

News and Miscellanea …

• Obviously this weeks big thing was all the feedback from the Carbon Festival – we did a full wrap including a bunch of links and the live blog transcripts here. Great event, and, really, keep an eye on it for next year – you’ll want to go.
• Stupidkrap studios have updated their website, and they’re including more news, interviews and such to go along with their online store – really enjoying what they’re doing with it, and looking forward to seeing me to come! We need more of that kind of thing down here – kudos guys!
• We also forgot to mention that Ben Frost from Stupidkrap launched a new website the other week, very cool.
• Everfresh posted up a cool link to a new interview with Melbourne graffiti artist Lush – hilarious.
• Rekas blog had a great link over to Kid Zooms recent interview with Juxtapoz – West Oz’ers doin it good n proper over in the NYC.
• Almost completely out of the ballpark, but I can’t go past posting this recent interview with a personal favourite – Retna. ’m sure he’ll have something to do with Australian art soon … right?
• Now, completely out of the ballpark, but this is the wrap and miscellanea, and its the only place we ever put this stuff! I have to put in a plug for one of our favourite bands, and good friends, Freak Technique who are playing at Red Bennies in Melbourne this Sunday – they’re amazing, go see them. – and as long s I’m mentioning shit outside the box, also go and check out pics of the new Qubic store that just opened up, totally fresh – gunna have to stop by there next time I’m over that way …

Pics And Images From Around The Traps …

• Some nice work up again from TwoOne for one of his upcoming shows!
• Some nice shots from Ironlak of the Back Burners show at LoFi up – I also really loved this Askew piece!
• Randomly saw this Beastman vs Yok painting posted up on flickr – (cant remember where I first saw it!) these two together, damn!
• You should all know who the talented Michael Peck is, so have a look at this great new wall piece that he did up in Sydney.
• .. you’ve also probably seen this, but its hilarious, and if you look at just one of these images look at this one! Ah, cause and effect … haha
• TEZ over at Nice Produce did this awesome character up in Newcastle with the people at the urban art/graff SAW project – mintox.
• Theres some great new photos of the recent Cat Rabbit exhibition in Melbourne up on the No Vacancy website.
• Did we cover these images from MEGAs show at the Fed Square Atrium yet as part of the Carbon wrap? If we did, too bad, here they are on Project 4000 – totally love it.
• We saw a post about this artist, Pencil Rebellion, over at This Life, after he just featured in Desktop Magazine, and wow – robots. Wow.

Also, don’t forget to check out the full listings of all the shows happening this weekend and into the near future on our Calendar! Also, don’t forget to like our page on facebook, we do a lot of out-of-blog updates, news and pics over there!

That’s all from us for this week, have a great weekend all!

Well, it took us a while to choose one out of the many entries we got – almost every entry was pretty damn schmick, so firstly we’d like to thank everyone who took the time out to design something and send it through to us – the support we get for this site always gives us the fuzzys, and all the entrants are totally mintox for taking the time out to do something up for us.

Anyways, we finally made a decision, and we think that its a great one! If you look up the top of the page there, you’ll see the new logo – we reckon its pretty cool and works great with our overall theme and we hope that you agree – the man that designed it, Pino Coppolino, is a talented dude.

“I was born in Melbourne but spent most of my youth in Italy. It was there, from a very early age, that I became interested in art and design. Whilst in Italy, I also successfully completed art school, a photography course, and a Chemistry degree!

It took me a long time, working in many different careers, before I finally came back around to doing what I’m really passionate about … art and design. I’ve now been working in the graphic design industry for the last fifteen years, and I’m still totally in love with the work that I do.

In addition to being a freelance designer, I coordinate and lead a team of designers for a Melbourne based design and printing firm, providing end-to-end branding, corporate identity and marketing solutions to our clients. From business cards to billboards, my design expertise includes logo design, illustrations, websites, brochures, flyers, booklets, etc.

As a designer, I strive to create outstanding designs that push the envelope – clean and uncluttered design is the common thread throughout my portfolio, and, I hope, winning this competition is a testament to the widespread appeal of the designs that I produce.

If you are interested in having something unique and sophisticated created for you, feel free to contact me via email."

Once again, thanks to everyone that entered, and thankyou to Pino for giving us our new visual identity – you’ll be seeing it, and variations of it, a lot more of it in the future, we hope!

Well, its been a good three or so weeks off, but its back at it as of today – I’ve dusted off my laptop, thrown the stacks of accumulated beer and rekorderlig in the recycle bin and mournfully made my way to work …

We’ve got a bunch of stuff coming up in the next few weeks, and some cool plans for the coming year – 2011 looks set to be pretty damn amazing. We’ll also be announcing the winner of our logo competition within the next week or so – we had a number of entries, and we’re slowly getting around to trying to make the decision on which one we think will fit best – no easy task!

We’ve got a cool bunch of interviews coming up over the next week or two, starting with a feature piece on Heesco – that’ll be up in the next day or two, but, until then, its more news of shows, and the usual – cant wait for everything that’s happening and to check out all the amazing art that the

Welcome to 2011!

Well, its about time we got ourselves a logo to put on the site, on our cards, on flyers, on pretty much anything we need it for– so, heres the details for our little comp …

$250 Prize money

• Competition deadline is December 30th, 11:59:59pm
• As many entries per person as you’d like.
• In terms of the logo, we’re not just looking for text – we’d love to have some kind of icon to work with.
• Simple simple simple! We love detail, but simple is better for this stuff, as any of you designers know ..
• Use the colour scheme from this site – its gotta fit in, and we like these colours!
• Winning entry has to be provided in a print-ready format (vector – eps, illustrator, pdf etc) with any transparencies intact etc, all ready for resizing and print jobs
• Send your entries to the name of this site at gmail.com with the subject title “Invurt Logo Comp”– please, no emails over 10 megs, thanks! Lower res jpgs will do just fine for now!
• Things we love that would be cool themes to use: futurism, robots, dinosaurs, street & urban art, scifi, upside down shit, superheroes, otters, booze and girls!

We’ll be using the logo for everything that we do in the future, anything we send out, any press, any events we work with … and your name will be attached to it, and prominently linked to from this site.  The top five logos will be posted when we announce the winner, with a write up on each of the artists – and we’d love to do a feature interview on the artist who wins … sure, we know the prize money isn’t a huge amount, comparatively, and I have no idea if its enough to get a lot of response – but its maybe a little bit of extra cash that we’d hope we can get to you after new years to make up for that hole in your bank account from boozing it up over the break …

Why we need a logo …

We’ve had a pretty cool almost-first year so far here. We hit over 100,000 page views a month a while ago, and we’re on track to hit 1 million pages this year by the end of December – not huge compared to others sites I’m sure, but, I mean, wow – thankyou so much – that’s kinda an awesome milestone for all the slogging and putting so much personal time into this thing – its amazing that others get as much out of all of this as I do, and its amazing how welcoming and supportive everyone has been in the past year.

Anyways, we’re going to be working on some cool projects through 2011 – our biggest ethos here is to give back as much as we can, and offering as much support we can for all the artists, galleries and crews involved in doing this stuff – so in order to ramp things up a little more, well, its about time we branded this shit up, don’t ya think? So, I’m going to dig into my pocket after new years and put up a small amount, and do a call out for entries for a logo for the site …

We’d love your support, we’d love your entries, but mostly, we just love that you enjoy reading us – again, thanks. If you have any questions, just add them to the comments, or email us at the name of this site at gmail.com or contact us!

I just realised that it’s been almost six months since I decided to, mostly,  move on from writing about music, and to really getting back into covering my first love: art.

Its always been the goal that once I managed to regularly cover events here in Melbourne, that I wanted to begin to cover events and artists out in other parts of Australia – so, I’m looking for people to help out here and there to cover events and artists across the rest of Oz. (more…)

Well, its been a pretty rough last two or three weeks here  - fighting off a massive flu, followed by a super-resistant infection of plague proportions, coupled with some dodgy bastard breaking in to the office at a friends bar and stealing my laptop (privacy be damned, they have him on CCTV, give me a photo of the fucker!) with a hell of a lot of stuff that hadn’t (stupid, stupid I should know so much better) been backed up … so, forgive me for having been a bit light on updates and such here, but hopefully after this weekend things will be  back on track again …

Coming up tonight, don’t forget that Meggs has his solo exhibition at the new Backwoods gallery, which, incidental, is also the opening show for itself – looks funky.

New week, Wooden Foundations will be opening, and the show is shaping up to look amazing – I was hoping to get up a great feature last week with Twoone to couple with this show, but, alas, thats correct – its being re-written (did I mention how much I hate thieves?) – at least I still have all the notes and photos! Don’t forget to check out the Wooden Foundations blog (which has some pretty amazing stuff on it) to keep up on what they’re doing in the next week.

At Large Gallery is currently also running the Northern Exposure Group Exhibition – I managed to drag my pestilent carcass out to that last Friday for a little while, and the quality of the work there is second to none – a wide range of styles and a high degree of talent on show. Theres some awesome photos of the show and the opening up as well – this is running until next weekend.

We also saw that Reka has a new exhibition in the works, no details yet, but make sure you keep up both here and on his blog for more details coming on that.

Don’t forget also to pick up a copy of Street|Studio, I had plenty of time whilst on the couch the past two weeks to read it cover to cover, and I have to say that not only was it informative, but all kinds of inspirational. They’re actually launching it in London (And Brissy, Adelaide and Sydney), over the next month), and I know theres a few of you that read this blog from those spots, so go and check it out if you’re keen.

Thats pretty much whats going on at the moment, but stay tuned for more events, interviews and general other shit – and hopefully the plague has now passed and I can get on with giving you regular news and shit on whats going on.

Ez.

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