Tag: Craig ‘Skibs’ Barker

Interview with Craig ‘Skibs’ Barker for his Installation “Suzy Is A Surf Rocker” at The New Vanguard II

Can you explain your creative approach when developing your installation/solo for the New Vanguard II?

In developing my first solo museum installation, “Suzy Is A Surf Rocker”, I wanted to be very thoughtful and focused with my imagery. I began simply drawing sketches and writing down ideas, as well as collecting objects and ephemera to fill the large amount of wall space I was given. When I had narrowed down the ideas into a definitive, cohesive direction began the process of time management in my studio preparing all of the paintings, objects, photographs, and support pieces. Once I had begun the installation process at the museum the fun really started, but strategic editing had to also take place during the process. I always bring way more of everything than I need for a large-scale installation, and this was no exception! Finally, building what I had envisioned in my mind for months on the MOAH walls was an incredible…and at times exhausting…experience.

In 100 years from now, what do you think will be said about the New Contemporary art movement?

100 years from now I believe what will be said about our movement will be that it has been the most all-encompassing, inclusive movement in history. This movement has the most diverse styles, disciplines, genders, ethnicities, geography, exhibition venues…the list of inclusion goes on and on!  The New Contemporary Movement is the first to have grown up during the internet age…giving an instant platform to artists of all kinds worldwide. This kind of exposure has shone a bright light on artists and styles that would have never seen a glimmer in the past gallery/museum pantheon. This exhibition is a shining example of that fact!

What does it mean to you as an artist to have your work be shown at a museum?

Having my work…and our movement…shown at museums is the realization that all of the hard work of the artists, gallerists, collectors, and fans is being accepted at a whole other level now. Although, it still means almost as much to me to show my work in a local gallery, coffee house, warehouse pop-up, or anywhere that supports current and up-and-coming artists. The wide variety of venues available to new artists has had a huge impact on why The New Contemporary Movement has grown to museum levels.

If your body of work had a signature cocktail or drink, what would it be made of and called?

Oh man!!! I suppose it would have to be some kind of kitschy tropical drink with lots of rum and fruit juice…garnished with pineapple chunks, flowers and a tiny umbrella…and would probably be called “skibs kula’i wai”…loosely translated as “skibs knockout juice”…HA!

Favorite part about Lancaster, or something you learned about Lancaster during your time there working on your install for the New Vanguard II?

Oh, this one is easy…favorite for sure was the people! Not just the people who work in the museum…who were all amazing. The people in the shops, restaurants, bars…everyone was extremely nice and excited to see and meet us while we were out and about in their city.

There are a lot of amazing artists in the exhibition, and this question may be difficult to answer, but which artists in this show would you want to collaborate with on or steal an artsy secret/technique from that you want to use too?

Geez, come on!!!! I guess if I had to narrow down that insane list of talent…I would want to do a collab with Chris Konecki. I think his 3D, mixed media, sculptures, and ambiguously vintage imagery would mix well with my similar aesthetic. I would want to steal some of Jaune’s stenciling techniques…the details and accuracy he creates with that hard edge technique are incredible

 

Artist Talks with Spenser Little and Craig “Skibs” Barker at Lancaster MOAH

Hop in your car and join us in Lancaster this afternoon as Craig “Skibs” Barker will lead a walk-through of his exhibition, Suzy is a Surf Rocker today,  November 25 at 1 pm followed by a walk-thru and talk with Spenser Little at 2 pm.

Craig “Skibs” Barker Bio:

Barker has been immersed in both the punk rock and surf culture of southern California since the early 1980s. His imagery, being informed by the print media and graphics of the subcultural terrain shaping the time period, reflects this upbringing. Influenced and surrounded by punk flyers, album covers and surfing magazines, Barker began testing his artistic skills by initially making flyers and t-shirts for his punk bands and his friends. Barker’s work explores the junctions between past and present, memory and imagination, fantasy and reality, while creating a dialog between image and viewer.

Barker’s most recent paintings infuse his long-standing love for painting and rendering the human female figure with his punk-fueled graphic design aesthetic. Mixing different approaches, techniques and mediums, he creates a sense of memory, personal history and appreciation for the female form. Combining elements of pop culture and literary censorship, he creates layered scenes of voyeuristic playfulness. His artworks feel surreal and partial, yielding results of decontextualization. The way Barker frames his figurative subjects, his compositions feel like spontaneously taken polaroids.

Born and raised in Huntington Beach, Barker has been exhibiting installations and his paintings in places such as Long Beach Museum of Art, Thinkspace Projects Los Angeles and was featured at MOAH in 2014. His work has been included in Newbrow and Juxtapoz magazines.

Spenser Little Bio: 

Spenser Little is a self-taught artist who has been bending wire for the last 15 years, allowing his creativity to morph into images that range from simple wordplay to complex portraits. He has related his wire work to a mixture of playing chess and illustration, as the problem-solving component of the work is what continues to inspire himself to create larger and more complex pieces.

 

The New Vanguard II at MOAH Lancaster

This past weekend The New Vanguard II opened at The Lancaster Museum of Art and History, in collaboration with Los Angeles’ Thinkspace Projects. The museum exhibition includes a dynamic group exhibition of works by international artists working in the New Contemporary art movement, with featured solo projects by artists Sandra Chevrier, Seth Armstrong, Craig ‘Skibs’ Barker, and Brooks Salzwedel.

Thank you to the awesome community of Antelope Valley who came out and celebrate these talented artists who are defining the new contemporary art space.

The exhibition is on view now through December 30th.

Full Gallery After the Jump

Continue reading The New Vanguard II at MOAH Lancaster

THE NEW VANGUARD II at The Lancaster Museum of Art and History // October 20th – December 30th

THE NEW VANGUARD II
October 20 – December 30, 2018
Curated by Thinkspace Projects

Sandra Chevrier | Cages and the Allure of Freedom
Seth Armstrong | Lil’ Baja’s Last Ride
Craig ‘Skibs’ Barker | Suzy is a Surf Rocker
Brooks Salzwedel | Rut in the Soil

(Lancaster, CA) – The Lancaster Museum of Art and History, in collaboration with Los Angeles’ Thinkspace Projects, is pleased to present The New Vanguard II, a dynamic group exhibition of works by international artists working in the New Contemporary art movement. The highly anticipated follow up to 2016’s successful first iteration of The New Vanguard, on view in tandem with this year’s POW WOW! Antelope Valley will feature special solo projects by artists Sandra Chevrier, Seth Armstrong, Craig ‘Skibs’ Barker, and Brooks Salzwedel.

A sequel to what was in 2016 the most extensive presentation of work from the New Contemporary movement in a Southern Californian museum venue to date, The New Vanguard II, in keeping with the first, will present a diverse and expansive group of curated new works. The group show will include new pieces by ABCNT, Adam Caldwell, Alex Garant, Alex Hall, Alexandra Manukyan, Amy Sol, Andrew Schoultz, Benjamin Garcia, Brian Mashburn, Carl Cashman, CASE, Dan Witz, Drew Merritt, EINE, Ekundayo, Ermsy, Esao Andrews, Evoca1, Fernando Chamarelli, Fidia Falaschetti, Fintan Magee, Helen Bur, Hueman, Hula, Huntz Liu, Jaune, Joel Daniel Phillips, Jolene Lai, Juan Travieso, Kaili Smith, Kathy Ager, Kikyz1313, Laura Berger, Lauren YS, Lonac, Mark Dean Veca, Mars-1, Martin Whatson, Masakatsu Sashie, Meggs, Michael Reeder, Milu Correch, The Perez Bros, PichiAvo, RISK, Robert Xavier Burden, Robert Proch, Ronzo, Saner, Scott Listfield , Sergio Garcia, Seth Armstrong, Skewville, Snik, Stephanie Buer, Super A, Super Future Kid, TikToy, Tran Nguyen, Van Arno, and Yosuke Ueno.

Alongside the focused solo presentations by Chevrier, Armstrong, Barker, and Salzwedel, the exhibition will include site-specific installations by Andrew Hem, Dan Witz, HOTxTEA, Isaac Cordal, Jaune, Laurence Vallieres, and Spenser Little.

A movement unified as much by its diversity as its similitude, ‘New Contemporary’ has come to denote an important heterogeneity of styles, media, contexts, and activations over the course of its establishment since the 90s. Unified in its fledgling beginnings by a founding countercultural impulse searching for its own nomenclature, the New Contemporary movement’s shifting and inclusive designations have offered alternative narratives over the years to those popularized by the dominant art establishment and its conceptual predilections.

Though stylistically disparate, the work belonging to this rapidly expansive movement reveals a desire to reference the popular, social, and subcultural domains of contemporary experience, grounding, rather than rarifying, imagery in the familiar. Looking to the urban landscape and the kaleidoscopic shift of individual identities within it, these artists use the figurative and narrative to anchor their work in the accessible and aesthetically relatable. A fundamentally democratic stance governs the ambitions of this new guard, ever in search of novel ways to expand rather than to contract.

Sandra Chevrier | Cages and the Allure of Freedom
The Montréal-based Canadian artist creates work that explores identity as a locus of competing imperatives and complex contradictions. Drawing parallels between the assumed invulnerability of the superhero and the impossible demands placed upon the contemporary individual, Chevrier creates literal and metaphoric masks by combining comic book imagery assembled from found and imagined sources. Her dystopian spin on the iconic figure of the superhero looks to reveal the flaws in the staged extroversion of the superficial veneer.

In Cages and the Allure of Freedom, her first significant solo museum presentation, Chevrier will be showcasing large-scale sculptural works for the first time including three massive portrait based reliefs alongside three life-sized, hand-painted busts complementing some of her largest two-dimensional acrylic on canvas works.

Seth Armstrong | Lil’ Baja’s Last Ride
Los Angeles-based painter Seth Armstrong creates paintings that arrest a sense of time. Some offer expansive views and others a contracted intimacy, moving freely in and out of public and private spaces to create intersecting narratives. Known for paintings that self-consciously capture the act of looking – whether as a voyeur in trespass or a participant in the landscape – Armstrong apprehends the simultaneity of the city as a place of endless, contingent narratives, jarring interruptions, and suspenseful pauses.

In Lil’ Baja’s Last Ride, the artist presents a sequential vignette of over ten new paintings in which his own car becomes an unlikely protagonist. His immersive approach to his subject matter often produces anecdotal adjuncts. Following several pilgrimages into the landscape between his home in LA and Lancaster for the exhibition, a route, incidentally, which also happens to have personal childhood significance for the artist, Armstrong’s beloved beater and proverbial instrument of research, ‘Lil’ Baja,’ caught fire and was partially incinerated in the museum’s parking lot. The overarching narrative structure of the works feels ambiguously suspended somewhere between fiction, social realism, and personal history. In an ending befitting Armstrong’s own penchant for cinematic turns, poetic hooks, and absurd knacks, Lil’ Baja’s Last Ride is an unexpected swan song in memoriam to an old friend’s final expedition.

Craig ‘Skibs’ Barker | ‘Suzy is a Surf Rocker’
A Huntington Beach native based in Southern California, mixed media painter Craig ‘Skibs’ Barker creates imagery inspired by print media and the graphic sensibilities of 80’s SoCal punk and surf, the subcultural terrain shaping the 80’s in which he grew up. His works feel surreal and partial, intentionally stylized to the point of decontextualization. By framing figurative subjects with an element of voyeuristic ambiguity, Barker’s compositions have the intuitive spontaneity of a Polaroid and the deliberate staging of a stencil. Familiar and far, they feel strange in their proximity.

Brooks Salzwedel | Rut in the Soil
Born in Long Beach, Salzwedel creates translucent landscapes that shift in and out of solid and ethereal states. Like fluid worlds suspended in a cycle of perpetual haunting, the imagery often feels loosely real but undeniably hallucinated and invoked. His works play with the depiction of these unhinged natural and hyperbolically unnatural physical states, combining sparse terrains with fictional mountain ranges and shadowy, diaphanous atmospheres. His mixed-media drawing-based works are created using a combination of graphite, mylar and resin, tape, colored pencil, and ink.

Exhibition on view October 20 through December 30 at:
Lancaster Museum of Art and History
665 W. Lancaster Blvd.
Lancaster, California 93534
www.LancasterMOAH.org

Taking place as part of POW! WOW! Antelope Valley
www.PowWowWorldwide.com

THE NEW VANGUARD II at the LANCASTER MUSEUM OF ART & HISTORY Coming This October

THE NEW VANGUARD II
October 20 – December 30, 2018
Curated by Thinkspace Projects

Sandra Chevrier | Cages and the Allure of Freedom
Seth Armstrong | Lil’ Baja’s Last Ride
Craig ‘Skibs’ Barker | Suzy is a Surf Rocker
Brooks Salzwedel | Rut in the Soil

(Lancaster, CA) – The Lancaster Museum of Art and History, in collaboration with Los Angeles’ Thinkspace Projects, is pleased to present The New Vanguard II, a dynamic group exhibition of works by international artists working in the New Contemporary art movement. The highly anticipated follow up to 2016’s successful first iteration of The New Vanguard, on view in tandem with this year’s POW WOW! Antelope Valley will feature special solo projects by artists Sandra Chevrier, Seth Armstrong, Craig ‘Skibs’ Barker, and Brooks Salzwedel.

A sequel to what was in 2016 the most extensive presentation of work from the New Contemporary movement in a Southern Californian museum venue to date, The New Vanguard II, in keeping with the first, will present a diverse and expansive group of curated new works. The group show will include new pieces by ABCNT, Adam Caldwell, Alex Garant, Alex Hall, Alexandra Manukyan, Amy Sol, Andrew Schoultz, Benjamin Garcia, Brian Mashburn, Carl Cashman, CASE, Dan Witz, Drew Merritt, EINE, Ekundayo, Ermsy, Esao Andrews, Evoca1, Fernando Chamarelli, Fidia Falaschetti, Fintan Magee, Helen Bur, Hueman, Hula, Huntz Liu, Jaune, Joel Daniel Phillips, Jolene Lai, Juan Travieso, Kaili Smith, Kathy Ager, Kikyz1313, Laura Berger, Lauren YS, Lonac, Mark Dean Veca, Mars-1, Martin Whatson, Masakatsu Sashie, Meggs, Michael Reeder, Milu Correch, The Perez Bros, PichiAvo, RISK, Robert Xavier Burden, Robert Proch, Ronzo, Saner, Scott Listfield , Sergio Garcia, Seth Armstrong, Snik, Stephanie Buer, Super A, Super Future Kid, TikToy, Tran Nguyen, Van Arno, and Yosuke Ueno.

Alongside the focused solo presentations by Chevrier, Armstrong, Barker, and Salzwedel, the exhibition will include site-specific installations by Andrew Hem, Dan Witz, HOTxTEA, Isaac Cordal, Jaune, Laurence Vallieres, and Spenser Little.

A movement unified as much by its diversity as its similitude, ‘New Contemporary’ has come to denote an important heterogeneity of styles, media, contexts, and activations over the course of its establishment since the 90s. Unified in its fledgling beginnings by a founding countercultural impulse searching for its own nomenclature, the New Contemporary movement’s shifting and inclusive designations have offered alternative narratives over the years to those popularized by the dominant art establishment and its conceptual predilections.

Though stylistically disparate, the work belonging to this rapidly expansive movement reveals a desire to reference the popular, social, and subcultural domains of contemporary experience, grounding, rather than rarifying, imagery in the familiar. Looking to the urban landscape and the kaleidoscopic shift of individual identities within it, these artists use the figurative and narrative to anchor their work in the accessible and aesthetically relatable. A fundamentally democratic stance governs the ambitions of this new guard, ever in search of novel ways to expand rather than to contract.

Sandra Chevrier | Cages and the Allure of Freedom
The Montréal-based Canadian artist creates mixed-media works that explore identity as a locus of competing imperatives and complex contradictions. Drawing parallels between the assumed invulnerability of the superhero and the impossible demands placed upon the contemporary individual, Chevrier creates literal and metaphoric masks by combining comic book imagery assembled from found and imagined sources. Her dystopian spin on the iconic figure of the superhero looks to reveal the flaws in the staged extroversion of the superficial veneer.

In Cages and the Allure of Freedom, her first significant solo museum presentation, Chevrier will be showing three life-sized, hand-painted sculptural busts for the first time alongside new two-dimensional works in acrylic, graphite, china ink, and pastels.

Seth Armstrong | Lil’ Baja’s Last Ride
Los Angeles-based painter Seth Armstrong creates paintings that seize time, near-cinematic moments of suspended or implied action. Some offer vast views, and others contracted intimacy, moving freely in and out of public and private spaces to create ambiguous vantage points. Known for paintings that self-consciously capture the act of looking – whether as a voyeur in trespass or a participant in the landscape – Armstrong captures the simultaneity of the city as a place of endless, contingent narratives, jarring interruptions, and suspenseful pauses.

In Lil’ Baja’s Last Ride, Armstrong combines his patented interest in the grittier recesses of urban life with his penchant for humor and a good inside joke, dedicating the exhibition’s title to his recently retired car, the unsuspecting casualty of a freak fire in the MOAH’s parking lot.

Craig ‘Skibs’ Barker | ‘Suzy is a Surf Rocker’
A Huntington Beach native based in Southern California, mixed media painter Craig ‘Skibs’ Barker creates imagery inspired by print media and the graphic sensibilities of 80’s SoCal punk and surf, the subcultural terrain shaping the 80’s in which he grew up. His works feel surreal and partial, intentionally stylized to the point of decontextualization. By framing figurative subjects with an element of voyeuristic ambiguity, Barker’s compositions have the intuitive spontaneity of a Polaroid and the deliberate staging of a stencil. Familiar and far, they feel strange in their proximity.

Brooks Salzwedel | Rut in the Soil
Born in Long Beach, Salzwedel creates translucent landscapes that shift in and out of solid and ethereal states. Like fluid worlds suspended in a cycle of perpetual haunting, the imagery often feels loosely real but undeniably hallucinated and invoked. His works play with the depiction of these unhinged natural and hyperbolically unnatural physical states, combining sparse terrains with fictional mountain ranges and shadowy, diaphanous atmospheres. His mixed-media drawing-based works are created using a combination of graphite, mylar and resin, tape, colored pencil, and ink.

Exhibition on view October 20 through December 30 at:
Lancaster Museum of Art and History
665 W. Lancaster Blvd.
Lancaster, California 93534
www.LancasterMOAH.org

Taking place as part of POW! WOW! Antelope Valley
www.PowWowWorldwide.com