NuArt

profile Volume I

The Mind of Maya Hayuk

the inspiration behind her mind blowing creations

exclusive

Martin Whatson

NuArt Festival 2014

CONTENTS

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Work: Untitled Art: Borondo

ElectricInk

ART WORK BY DAVID WALKER

Hayuk’s Mind Distortion: Hayuk shares what inspires her to create

Soze Agenda: Insider on upcoming events and details on the shows

Artist to Watch: Alec Monopoly: Faceless but recognized

NuArt Festival 2014 Recap: From start to finish; full details on the whole event

Whatson Blues: Martin Whatson explains his 2014 NuArt murals

The Story Behind Banksy: The reserved artist invites us to learn about is upbringing

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Hayuk’s Mind Distortion

by Corrina Peipon

The process of painting an abstract, largely improvised mural is riddled with anxiety, the frisson of challenge and intense, protracted focus that ultimately turns a corner and becomes the pure joy of abandon. There is evidence of these psychological states in Maya Hayuk’s paintings: tight lines waver, betraying a sudden shock; diluted paint drips displaying a studied carelessness give way to languid washes of color; compact shapes in rigid geometries open out into free forms, following an invisible poetic logic.

Control is visibly secured and eschewed in turn. Made in situ on deadline and fated either to be painted out after a few months or to live on in perpetuity, Hayuk’s murals are inherently risky business. The high stakes require consummate grace, but the circumstances contribute to the yield: the murals are vibrant imaginary landscapes that crackle with liveliness.

Studying the given architecture, Hayuk searches the space for details that might inform her composition. Her insistence on close scrutiny of the environment in which a mural will come to be ensures that the painting will integrate and harmonize with the space. No matter how elaborate and bright, woozy or graphic they are, her murals are never imposing but feel natural in the spaces in which they are situated. This sensitivity to place

is important; to envelop us in their possibility, the paintings must be intimately connected to their surroundings, attentive to the spatial equilibrium.

Nonetheless, Hayuk’s work can’t be missed: enormous in scale, with vivid colors and kaleidoscopic patterns, her murals hum with ecstatic energy. With such intensity laid bare on the walls, the subtle allowances she makes for a particular site dissolve into our experience of the work, unobtrusively heightening our apprehen-

Background: Art by Mayak Hayuk - Street Mural

Below: Art by Maya Hayuk Art display at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

sion of it.Hayuk is interested in space as a metaphor for the infinite frontier of the mind.

Travel through psychological space can be a spiritual journey, an expedition into a boundless interior world that she turns inside out for us in her immersive murals. Like most psychedelic art, Hayuk’s works explore the possibility of experiencing hallucinatory visions in concert with a deep connection to one’s own body. Turning on and tuning in—via psychedelic substances, meditation, deep listening, and so on—is about connecting to esthesis and consciousness through one’s body, using the body as a medium through which one may encounter the metaphysical.

Hayuk’s work gives form to and inspires such experience. While the paintings’ imagery is hallucinatory, their massive scale makes us acutely aware of our vision as being embodied. Visual pleasure is felt as an intellectual charge and as a physical sensation at once.

Psychedelic art has an especially intimate connection with music. Nascent in the 1950s among Beat poets and becoming more prominent in the 1960s with Andy Warhol’s Factory, his Exploding Plastic Inevitable events, and the Velvet Underground, psychedelic art and music came into their own by the late 1960s with artists like Rick Griffin, Bonnie MacLean, and Wes Wilson designing posters for bands like the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Collectives like the Brother-

Q&A

with Maya Hayuk

Can you tell us a bit about your creative process?

Sure! My hands are always dirty, I hate alarm clocks and I’m a total insomniac. I never get everything done that I like, but I always learn something unexpected. I don’t plan out what I am working on too much, because then it feels done and therefore I don’t see the point of actually finishing it. My dreams, the news, music and my boyfriend, Andrew, are the greatest sources of inspiration to me. I rub my eyes a lot and I stare more than I actually paint, but then once I’m painting, I’m painting fast.

What preparation goes into producing large scale content, like a wall mural?

I start by considering the surrounding environment, placement in the architecture and what the viewable vantage points might be. It’s important to ask: What belongs here? What’s missing here?

After dreaming big, the rest always seems to be a negotiation of what I’d like to do with what is actually possible. The rest of the preparation is the same as a any project: gathering materials and making the timing work.

Being a public artist, knowing that your work will be displayed temporarily, how do you feel when your work is covered with something else?

Lucky that it got to exist at all. Really, name something that lasts forever? I’m not trying to get all esoteric or anything, but it actually feels liberating knowing that the time that a painting is alive has a perfect little moment in our personal histories and it can’t be bought or sold. So, if you got to see it one day on a day you weren’t expecting to or someone sent you a photograph of themselves with one of my murals behind them, then it’s actually weirdly and beautifully eternal.

Does this just come with territory or do you have an emotional attachment to your work?

Yes it’s part of the nature of public work and of evolution and yes, I’m emotionally attached to my work. I always kiss them goodbye before I go.

In three words how would you best describe your work?

I love you.

Interview by Lisa M. Corso

005 hood of Light and the Heavy Water Light Show became famous for their liquid light shows, projections of swirling colors that accompanied psychedelic rock concerts.

The relatively short history of psychedelic art involves not only music and images that document or heighten hallucinatory visions but is interconnected with countercultural impulses calling for social change (particularly the peace movement), the desire to experience altered states springing from a mistrust of dominant social ideals and official culture.

In music, the repetition, improvisation, poetic lyrics, and volume that characterize psychedelic rock were revived in the lush new wave sounds of the 1980s and the independent rock scene of the 1990s.

Today musicians like Animal Collective and Akron Family continue to draw from and experiment with the possibilities of psychedelic sounds and images, disregarding artistic categories in the quest for synesthesia. Carrying on the tradition of pursuing insight through heightened awareness and engagement with the world, Hayuk’s practice extends beyond her murals, paintings, and prints into broader investigations of the potential of art to have a social impact. In 2008 she created a pro-democracy installation as part of the Democratic National Convention. From 2005 to 2011 she was part of Monster Island, a workspace and collective environment in Brooklyn.

Following the demolition of the building that housed Monster Island, she founded the Center for the Advancement of Contemporary Art, a workspace and collaborative platform. As part of her collaborative project with artist Jef Scharf known as the Positive Future Prophecy Posse, she has produced an ongoing series of publicly displayed posters declaring. Perhaps less inward looking, many of Heilmann’s neon and black abstractions describe the New York night. While her colors evoke the hopped-up cool of rock-and-roll city life, her contiguously arranged multipanel canvases suggest the rifts and fragmentation symptomatic of late-capitalist society and the daily traumas that it inflicts.

Festival 2014

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NuArt

by JaimeRojo&

StevenHarrington

the façade of a classic Norwegian building with his geometric interpretation of rocks found poking up from the soil, and the three dimensional mural of homeless people by Brooklyn-based Iranian brothers Icy & Sot only three blocks from an outdoor encampment of homeless travelers whom some locals call gypsies.

Such is one of the traditions of Street Art: social and political commentary that some call activism because of its advocacy, or at least its stubborn acknowledgement of imperfections in the human condition. This year’s Nuart fosters the spirit and intellectual pursuit associated with academic examination and in doing so again separates itself from the growing number of Street Art festivals who implicitly or explicitly censor the

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The Norwegian mural festival named Nuart took place last week with a marked tilt toward the conceptual and the interventionist, a direct debate about the relevance of activism amidst a rising tide of sanctioned murals, and Tilt leading us down a path toward traditional graffiti.

Ironically graffiti seemed a rather tame topic for once.

“Urban interventionism is about not only making social commentary through artistic expression, but actually intervening in a public and social space in a poetic, unexpected or provocative way,” said architect and organizer Nicola Markhus when speaking to the local Stavangernews. Markhus may have been thinking about the Portuguese artist Maismenos, who constructed a miniature oil tanker platform from found objects and installed it temporarily atop a sculpture honoring canning workers in Lervig Courtyard, by way of contrasting the past with the present or maybe she was thinking about the Madrid-based SpY, who painted a massive red-lettered “ERROR” on two sides

ABOVE LEFT

Art by MARTIN WHATSON

ABOVE RIGHT

Art by BORONDO

of a brutal block long building in decay down by the waterside, an ironic judgment on the eyesores of unfortunate urban decay.

Among the contextual social commentary as well were the oil-dripping sentiments of geologist/artist Andreco, who regaled

choices of the invited due to commercial or political pressures. Even during the painting this year there were conversations among artists about a high profile festival underway elsewhere that had just dis-invited certain Street Artists because of their “political” work in the past.

As if to drive the point home, New York street and multimedia artist John Fekner, who created hundreds of environmental, social, political and conceptual works consisting of stenciled words in NYC beginning in the 1970s that highlighted failed urban planning and public policy, was invited to reprise his classic text based “False Promises” stencil here.

The choice of Fekner was perhaps atypical and one that could be overlooked if Nuart founder Martyn Reed didn’t decide to champion the artists work in his mini-retrospective indoors. And need

we mention that his indoor installation space for Saturday’s gallery opening was shared by Fra.Biancoshock’s instantly controversial merging of the nazi flag with the Facebook logo? Moments after we posted an early image of the installation in progress, cheers and condemnation populated our social media feeds - a happy discord that Nuart isn’t traditionally spooked by.”

This is a representation of two different iconic movements; the Nazis and the Facebook age,” says the Milan based Fra.Biancoshock who specializes in street interventions, not street art, per se. “I wanted to unite the two concepts in a unique logo as a way of describing two different ways to have control of the masses in two different ages. It is a provocative representation that is meant to say, ‘Imagine if these two things had met in the same period,’ “ he explains of the illuminated wheel of instantly recognizable letter “f”s popping from a four alarm red background at the temporary gallery show in “tunnels” at Tou Scene.

“Obviously the story of the Nazis is very dramatic and heavy, and Facebook is only social media, but for me if it is not used in the right way it could result in some serious damage; in the areas of privacy, in having control (of people).

So I wanted to make this interpretation of our contemporary situation of a certain totalitarianism in our communications today.” Comparatively the graffiti writer on display this year is a relative lightweight! Toulouse-based Tilt actually created one of the more visually compelling installations (and an instant hit) at the indoor gallery of Tou Scene entitled “Panic Bathroom”, which consists of a tiled men’s restroom evenly split between YMCA and CBGB. The untouched half is pristine and gleaming white while its brother across the line is slaughtered floor to ceiling by pugilistic color, swollen bubbles and drippy tags; all just out of reach of the velvet rope that holds guests back.

For the Norwegian born street artist named Strøk, Nuart this year is as much about aesthetics and the beauty of the moment as it is the intellectualizing that was on display here during the pub.

O O pportunities have not arrived easy for these artists, whose work is misunderstood. Debate and two days of presentations for Nuart PLUS, organized by Eirik Sjåholm Knudsen. He shows us his rendering of figures casting long shadows across the wall on his glossy tablet and he talks about composition, negative space, and the serendipity of catching figures in motion.

“I like watching people running around and seeing these movements, these frozen moments when they are heading somewhere but you don’t know exactly where - like a moment when time has frozen,” he says.

“It’s a snapshot and you just happened to be there.” Fortunately for many Nuart still knows how to produce a memorable shot of art in the public sphere, and we have some here for you to enjoy.

A representation of two

different iconic movements; the Nazis and the Facebook age,” says the Milan based Fra.Biancoshock who specializes in street interventions, not street art, per se. “I wanted to unite the two concepts in a unique logo as a way of describing two different ways to have control of the masses in two different ages. It is a provocative representation that is meant to say, ‘Imagine if these two things had met in the same period,’ “ he explains of the illuminated wheel of instantly recognizable letter “f”s popping from a four alarm red background at the temporary gallery show in “tunnels” at Tou Scene.

“Obviously the story of the Nazis is very dramatic and heavy, and Facebook is only social media, but for me if it is not used in the right way it could result in some serious damage; in the areas of privacy, in having control (of people).

It is a provocative representation that is meant to say, ‘Imagine if these two things had met in the same period,’ “ he explains of the illuminated wheel of instantly recognizable letter “f”s popping from a four alarm red background at the temporary gallery show in “tunnels” at Tou Scene. “Obviously the story of the Nazis is very dramatic and heavy, and Facebook is only social media, but for me if it is not used in the right way it could result in some serious damage; in the areas of privacy, in having control (of people).

I wanted to make this interpretation of our contemporary situation of a certain totalitarianism in our communications today.” Toulouse-based Tilt actually created one of the more visually compelling installations (and an instant hit) at the indoor gallery of Tou Scene entitled “Panic Bathroom”, which consists of a tiled men’s restroom evenly split between YMCA and CBGB. Markhus may have been thinking about the Portuguese artist Maismenos, who constructed a miniature oil tanker platform from found objects and installed it temporarily atop a sculpture honoring canning workers in Lervig Courtyard, by way of contrasting the past with on two sides of a brutal block long building in decay down by the waterside, an ironic judgment on the eyesores of very unfortunate urban decay.

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Soze Gallery West Hollywood

November 2014 11.01.14

Ben Frost

11.16.14

11.25.14

Mel Erin Riley Kadel

About The Soze Collection: On Saturday, November 1st, 2014 Soze Gallery is pleased to present an exhibit of unique custom painted Modernica fiberglass shell chairs made to benefit THE ART OF ELYSIUM. Established artists including RETNA, Erin Riley, Aaron De La Cruz, Ben Frost, Mel Kadel and many others will display custom painted chairs that are works of art in and of themselves. A portion of the proceeds will go directly to THE ART OF ELYSIUM to support the incredible work they do.

About The Art of Elysium: The Art of Elysium is dedicated to enriching the lives of the artists and hospital youth. We believe that there is a powerful and mutual exchange of hope and appreciation that occurs when artists share their time and talent with children battling serious medical conditions. The Art of Elysium, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1997, encourages working actors, artists and musicians to voluntarily dedicate their time and talent to children who are battling serious medical conditions. We provide artistic workshops in the following disciplines: acting, art, comedy, fashion, music, radio, songwriting and creative writing.

935 N. Fairfax Ave West Hollywood, CA 90046 Opening: Saturday, November 1st, 7-10pm

>

One of the local street artists creating for the 2014 Nuart is Martin Whatson. Whatson is a Norwegian stencil artist with a never ending urge to find beauty in what is often disregarded as ugly, outdated and left behind.

His early, more political style, has over the years developed into a very subtle art that combines graffiti, stencil art and decaying walls. Whatson’s 2014 Nuart mural is a good example of his artistic expression.

Painted on the gray wall of the house at the bottom of the Stavanger street, it shows stenciled, monochromatic young man pulling down the grey sheet of color, uncovering vibrantly colored graffiti that were painted over. Martin Whatson is born in Norway. He discovered stencils and the urban art scene while studying Art and Graphic design at Westerdals School of Communication, in Oslo. After following the development in the street art scene closely, he started his own artistic production in 2004. Whatson has a continuous urge to search for beauty in what is commonly dismissed as ugly, out of style or simply left behind.

Whatson looks for inspirations in city landscapes and old soon to be demolished buildings. His interest for decay has helped develop his style and composition.

He enjoys creating either unity or conflict between materials and motives. Since his artistic debut in 2006, he has had several solo exhibitions and participated in many group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Painted on the gray wall of the house street.

Whatson Blues

MORE POLITICAL GREY SHEETS FULL OF VIBRANT COLORED GRAFFITI

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Artist to Watch alec Monopoly

MONOPOLY

MONey makes the world

go‘round

I’m always subject to being caught, that vulnerability is part of the process and you just have to apply as much creativity to the process as you do the art.-Alec Monopoly

by: Ellen Rolfes Andy Warhol had Campbell Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. Alec Monopoly has Rich “Uncle” Pennybags and Madonna.

The street artist’s first solo show, “Park Place,” opened at the LAB ART Gallery in Los Angeles earlier this month.

Alec Monopoly, who is known only by his pseudonym, and the team at LAB ART transformed the gallery space, inside and out, into a life-size version of the Monopoly board game. Alec’s signature game piece, a 1964 Pontiac Catalina owned by actor Adrien Brody, was painted during the show.

“The idea behind the exhibit is to bring the game of Monopoly to life,” explained Alec, who sold one of his paintings in the show for $3 million — in Monopoly money.

Since each board game comes with $20,580, the buyer used money from 146 games to purchase the painting.

Iskander Lemseffer, co-founder of LAB ART Gallery, was immediately drawn to Alec’s work when he first saw it on the streets of Los Angeles five years ago. Alec, originally from New York City,

has lived in Los Angeles since 2006. He started creating graffiti 15 years ago.

Sitting on the floor watching Alec paint the Catalina, Lemseffer said, “I told him, ‘You do realize that one day this car will be in a museum.’”

When LAB ART opened in May 2011 — an auto body shop that Lemseffer and his sister Rachel Joelson transformed into a 6,500 square foot gallery that exclusively features street artists — Alec was one of the first featured artists. “Park Place” is open to the public through April 14. Alec’s art centers around the board game’s mascot, Rich “Uncle” Pennybags, a.k.a. Mr. Monopoly.

In his paintings and graffiti, Alec puts Pennybags into a variety of situations: Pennybags with no money, Pennybags running away, Pennybags crucified by Wall Street. Pennybags represents capitalism in a larger sense, Alec said, and his use of the image is a reminder that the road to financial success can sometimes mirror the efforts of someone attempting to win a board game.

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BEHIND

PEOPLE’S CHOICE

Banksy Best

BANKSY

Banksy 2012: Olympic Pieces

THE STORY

w

Banksy 2010: Follow Your Dreams

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

ON HIS WAY TO BECOMING AN INTERNATIONAL ICON, THE SUBVERSIVE AND SECRETIVE STREET ARTIST TURNED THE ART WORLD UP-SIDE-DOWN

hen Time magazine selected the British artist Banksy—graffiti master, painter, activist, filmmaker and all-purpose provocateur— for its list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2010, he found himself in the company of Barack Obama, Steve Jobs and Lady Gaga.

He supplied a picture of himself with a paper bag (recyclable, naturally) over his head. Most of his fans don’t really want to know who he is (and have loudly protested Fleet Street attempts to unmask him). But they do want to follow

Banksy 2009: Dorothy Police Search

Before the Art By 1999, he

was headed to

London. He was also beginning

to retreat into

anonymity. Evading

the authorities was one explanation— Banksy “has many issues with the cops.”

He also discovered that anonymity

created its own invaluable buzz.

his upward tra­jectory from the outlaw spraying—or, as the argot has it, “bombing”—walls in Bristol, England, during the 1990s to the artist whose work commands hundreds of thousands of dollars in the auction houses of Britain and America.

Today, he has bombed cities from Vienna to San Francisco, Barcelona to Paris and Detroit.

And he has moved from graffiti on gritty urban walls to paint on canvas, conceptual sculpture and even film, with the guileful documentary Exit Through the Gift

Shop, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Pest Control, the tongue-in-cheek-titled organization set up by the artist to authenticate the real Banksy artwork, also protects him from prying outsiders. Hiding behind a paper bag, or, more commonly, e-mail, Banksy relentlessly controls his own narrative. His last face-toface interview took place in 2003.

While he may shelter behind a concealed identity, he advocates a direct connection between an artist and his constituency. “There’s a whole new audience out there,

“As soon as I cut my first stencil I could feel the power there... the political edge.”

Banksy 2004: Kissing Coppers

Banksy, Artist

Above: Banksy

Spy Booth Mural

Banksy 2002: Balloon Girl

and it’s never been easier to sell [one’s art],” Banksy has maintained.

“You don’t have to go to college, drag ’round a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries or sleep with someone powerful, all you need now is a few ideas and a broadband connection. This is the first time the essentially bourgeois world of art has belonged to the people. We need to make it count.”

The Barton Hill district of Bristol in the 1980s was a scary part of town. Very white—probably no more than three black families had somehow ended up there— working-class, run-down and unwelcoming to strangers. So when Banksy, who came from a much leafier part of town, decided to go make his first foray there, he was nervous. “My dad was badly beaten up there as a kid,” he told fellow graffiti artist and author Felix Braun. He was trying out names at the time, sometimes signing himself Robin Banx, although this soon evolved into Banksy. The shortened moniker may have demonstrated less of the gangsters’ “robbing banks” cachet, but it was more memorable—and easier to write on a wall.

Around this time, he also settled on his distinctive stencil approach to graffiti. When he was 18, he once wrote, he was painting a train with a gang of mates when the British Transport Police showed up and everyone ran. “The rest of my mates made it to the car,” Banksy recalled, “and disappeared so I spent over an hour hidden under a dumper truck with engine oil leaking all over me.

He was also beginning to retreat into anonymity. Evading the authorities was one reason Banksy “has issues with the cops.”

But he also discovered that anonymity created its own invaluable buzz.

The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year with paper being 40 percent of the waste going to landfills; cutting down on paper waste will extend the lives of our landfills.