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Street Installations by SpY

SpY - Balloons

SpY is an urban artist who has been practicing forms of intervention, mostly traditional graffiti, since the mid-1980s. More recently, he has chosen to work within the confines of urban elements, often playing with their intentions and using them as a “palette of materials”.

I suggest checking out this book for a nice overview of urban intervention art like this. Much of it has a strong element of humour, wit, or playfulness. To me, the strength of this type of work lies in its ability to ambush your everyday life, disrupt your routine, or at the least, make you reconsider what the things around us are made of.

Image Above: Balloons (2008)

via: Colossal

SpY - 0 Likes

SpY – 0 Likes (2013)

SpY - Live

SpY – Live (2012)

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Open Studio – Civic Boredom: Street Remedies

Mark your calendars for Friday, October 26th at 7pm for an open studio of our artist-in-residence, Sam Lefort. You’ll remember Sam from earlier in the summer when she hosted a rapid fire series of workshops on urban ecology at CIVIC SPACE. She’ll be presenting a new project realized over the course of her residency in collaboration with students from J.L. Forster Secondary School. You’ll have a chance to meet Sam and the students!

The project, CIVIC BOREDOM: STREET REMEDIES,  features a series of temporary street art stencils installed around the city. Working through a series of workshops with Sam, the students created powerful text-based visual statements that will get residents and visitors starting to think about issues impacting youth.

Using custom card stock stencils and environmentally friendly, hand-made chalk paint (corn starch and water), students made their marks (temporarily) around downtown Windsor to try to bring some attention to their hopes and concerns for their futures and the future of the city.

Here are just a few of the installations around the city. LESS TALKING MORE DOING.

I WISH YOU COULD SEE THE POTENTIAL.

OUR FUTURE.

THEY JUST KEEP FIGHTNIG (sic).

See you Friday!

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Steve Powers: Distilling Daily Stories into Incredible Street Art

Saw this video of a talk given by Steve Powers (who we’ve written about before) posted on Juxtapoz.

Steve Powers (aka Espo) speaks about his art at the PSFK Conference NYC. Powers discusses his recent public and private art projects, along with explaining his one-a-day art “Daily Metaltation” pieces. Powers is one of our cover artists to the current May 2012 printed Juxtapoz.

[via Juxtapoz]

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INSIDE OUT: A Global Art Project

TED Prize Winner JR & INSIDE OUT from TED Prize on Vimeo.

A simple and gorgeous project from the artist, JR. I wrote about his last project a little while ago.

INSIDE OUT is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Upload a portrait. Receive a poster. Paste it for the world to see.

Everyone is challenged to use black and white photographic portraits to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world. These digitally uploaded images will be made into posters and sent back to the project’s co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities. People can participate as an individual or in a group; posters can be placed anywhere, from a solitary image in an office window to a wall of portraits on an abandoned building or a full stadium. These exhibitions will be documented, archived and viewable virtually.

INSIDE OUT is a collaboration between the artist JR, the TED Prize and you.
[via GOOD]

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Candy Chang’s Before I Die in NOLA

Josh posted on Candy Chang‘s last project, I Wish This Was, late last year and it was really inspiring. Such a simple gesture is such a powerful tool for re-imagining a community.

Today, I saw Chang’s latest project, Before I Die in NOLA — another lovely participatory public art project. Perhaps not quite as transformative as I Wish This Was, but the density in this project perhaps makes up for it.

Continue reading “Candy Chang’s Before I Die in NOLA”

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Power House Walking Tour: Understanding the Incremental

On Saturday, Eric, Danielle, and her sister, Jessica, and I headed over to the Power House neighbourhood walk in Detroit.

I’d been hoping to finally see this project in person, as it’s been a little over two years since I first wrote about it here. I’d missed their residency at the DIA (saw the installation, but didn’t get to see Mitch or Gina) and also missed them at MOCAD (but seeing their Neighborhood Machine on exhibition was very cool). So, to be able to get a tour and talk to Mitch about their project was really, really great.

Above, a to-do list from artist-in-residence, Monica Canilao, who plan to return to purchase the upper-half of this duplex.

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Urban Camouflage And The Potentials of Commissioned ‘Street Art’

Ceyetano Ferrer, City of Chicago (Iowa #2), 2006

Street artist Ceyetano Ferrer specializes in blending urban objects into their environments by painting layers over them in a way that makes them seem transparent. Ferrer uses photo stickers on public objects like street signs, boxes and billboards and camouflages them to create an illusion of the objects fading into the landscape. -via PSFK.com

The public art works of Ceyetano Ferrer are quite stunning on first glance. The optical illusion he creates seems at first impossible and mysterious, though the process is as “simple” as placing a well-planned sticker on to a surface. As far as “street art” goes, this very much falls in line with the guerilla style shock and awe that makes the genre so exciting and valuable in a certain sense of subversiveness.

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