Tag: new contemporary art

Herakut Installation for Vitality & Verve III : Transforming the Urban Landscape

HERAKUT is bringing their unique style to the walls of the Long Beach Museum of art, as they’ve been developing a new piece for ‘Vitality and Verve III’ this week at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Below include a few shots of the piece as a work in progress.

The duo, Herakut, HERA (Jasmin Siddiqui) and AKUT (Falk Lehmann) have been collaborating and working together for nearly 15 years. They are perfectly balanced, blending their own clearly defined and individual styles into a beautiful visual melody.  Herakut is a yin and yang forces that have come together and become one of the most influential duos in the street art scene today. Inspired by quotes, lyrics, and various narratives found within the world, they develop pieces with the main objective of communicating a message, and will use whatever medium they can to translate their thoughts, as the purpose of their art is to communicate.

Join us Friday, June 29th for the opening night gala, After Dark.

Tickets available now for only $15 at: www.lbma.org/after-dark-2018

“Vitality and Verve III” is the third iteration of the collaborative series curated by Thinkspace Projects with the support of POW! WOW! Long Beach for the Long Beach Museum of Art, and will be featuring ephemeral murals and installations from Bordalo II, CASE, Evoca, Sergio Garcia, Herakut, Hush,
Jaune, Leon Keer, Koz Dos, Spenser Little, Fintan Magee, Dennis McNett, Drew Merritt, Michael Reeder, RISK, SEEN, Amy Sol, Super A, Juan Travieso, Dan Witz and Lauren YS

The Long Beach Museum of Art presents:
‘VITALITY AND VERVE III’
Curated by Thinkspace with support from POW! WOW! Long Beach

On View June 30, 2018 thru September 9, 2018 at:

Long Beach Museum of Art
2300 East Ocean Boulevard
Long Beach, CA. 90803

Friday, June 29 opening night gala tickets available now for only $15 at:
www.lbma.org/after-dark-2018

VITALITY & VERVE III COMING TO LBMA AT THE END OF MONTH

Mark your calendars and follow Thinkspace_Art on Instagram because Vitality & Verve III is coming to the Long Beach Museum of Art at the end of this month, and you won’t want to miss all the behind the scenes development we’ll be sharing.

VITALITY AND VERVE III
Long Beach Museum of Art

‘Art After Dark’ Opening Reception: Friday, June 29, 2018

On View: June 30, 2018, thru September 9, 2018

Featuring ephemeral murals and installations from:
Bordalo II, CASE, Evoca, Sergio Garcia, Herakut, Hush,
Jaune, Leon Keer, Koz Dos, Spenser Little, Fintan Magee,
Dennis McNett, Drew Merritt, Michael Reeder, RISK, SEEN,
Amy Sol, Super A, Juan Travieso, Dan Witz and Lauren YS

 The Long Beach Museum of Art (LBMA) presents Vitality and Verve III, an exhibition dedicated to showcasing new works by artists of the New Contemporary Art Movement. Presented in curatorial collaboration with Los Angeles’ Thinkspace Projects and the support of POW! WOW! Long Beach, the exhibition is the third iteration in the collaborative series which has secured record-breaking public attendance since 2015.

Vitality and Verve III will present a relevant cross-section of some of the most exciting artists working under the New Contemporary handle today and will feature site-specific works by these 21 individuals brought together in the same space for the first time. Their impermanent installations are tangentially activated, transforming the ground floor and Ocean View gallery of the LBMA into an immersive ephemeral playground for the senses.

The exhibition will feature new, site-specific works by internationally renowned artists, Bordalo II, CASE, Evoca, Sergio Garcia, Herakut, Hush, Jaune, Leon Keer, Koz Dos, Spenser Little, Fintan Magee, Dennis McNett, Drew Merritt, Michael Reeder, RISK, SEEN, Amy Sol, Super A, Juan Travieso, Dan Witz and Lauren YS. Each will contribute a unique piece and vantage point, working across a variety of media.

The New Contemporary Art Movement is known for its diversity; several styles, media, contexts, and exhibition platforms fall within its expansive cast, including public art interventions and site-specific urban murals. This breadth has long been embraced as a subversive impulse vis-a-vis the more exclusionary and contained tenets of contemporary art production, particularly those minted in academe and aspiring to the vetted legitimacy of the ‘white cube.’ The movement’s vested interest in incorporating the social and representational, counter to its often systemic disavowal, has allowed it to thrive outside of institutional support, though this exclusionary paradigm is rapidly shifting.

Largely self-supported and community-driven since the 90’s, many of the movement’s artists are self-taught or have come into their own through multi-disciplinary backgrounds. Gaining international recognition over the past decade, the movement is now widely recognized as both the largest and longest running organized art movement in history, boasting veterans and established artists as well as emergent ones. The evocative potential of representation inspires these artists to draw from popular and countercultural sources like music, illustration, comics, graffiti, design, punk, tattoo culture, hip-hop, skate culture, etc., looking to the outside world rather than to the self-referential gestures that have typified the traditional exclusions of contemporary art.

Long Beach Museum of Art – 2300 East Ocean Boulevard, Long Beach, CA. 90803 – www.lbma.org

Click here to view posts on the 2016’s Vitality and Verve: In the Third Dimension

Click here to view posts on 2015’s Vitality and Verve: Transforming the Urban Landscape 

Opening Reception of “Flourish” at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum

Last weekend FLOURISH  at Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum curated by Thinkspace Gallery opened to a positive reception. We’d like to thank all that came to the exhibition from all over Arizona and beyond to support the opening night. We were so thrilled to see over 1,200 art lovers come through the doors of the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum in the beautiful Mesa Arts Center located in the heart of downtown Mesa, Arizona.

The site-specific ephemeral murals from Esao Andrews and Nosego along with the site-specific installation from Felipe Pantone are reason enough to visit, if not for the incredible group show featuring close to 100 artists from around the globe. A great introduction to the burgeoning New Contemporary Art Movement for those new to this scene and an incredible survey of some of the hottest artists out there for those that are in the know and already familiar. This landmark exhibition remains on view through August 6th, so please be sure to pay it a visit this summer.

For more information on the exhibition and to view the available pieces from the show visit the Thinkspace Gallery website.

more photos after the jump

Continue reading Opening Reception of “Flourish” at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum

Next Up at Thinkspace Gallery : Sandra Chevrier exhibition “The Cages; and the Reading Rooms of their Lives”

Sandra Chevrier

SANDRA CHEVRIER
The Cages; and the Reading Rooms of their Lives
October 15 – November 5, 2016

 Thinkspace is pleased to present new works by Sandra Chevrier in the gallery’s first solo exhibition for the Canadian artist, The Cages; and the Reading Rooms of their Lives. Based in Montréal, Chevrier creates mixed media works that combine sensuously rendered portraits of women with painted and collaged comic book overlays of superheroes. Manifold graphic segments and tear aways are used to obscure the facial features and bodies of her subjects partially. These iconographic images of conflict and struggle are posted over the contours of the flesh to create endlessly nuanced combinations, both heroic and dystopian in their allusions. Chevrier creates beautifully strange alloys of body and print to convey a personal terrain beset by social conflict.

In the artist’s Cages series, the vulnerable and human is offset by images of the superhero in varying situations of compromise, fragility, and struggle. The collision of identities both imperfect and paladin, suggests a conflicted and difficult vision of femininity; one colonized by competing ideals and expectations. Plastered both literally and figuratively with an illustrative veneer of superhuman archetypes and ideals, at times themselves in a state of injury or defect, Chevrier’s women become embattled vessels containing a host of incongruous roles. Her paintings are visually moody and dark, in spite of the primary colors and illustrative pictorials, and convey a depth and discomfort that resonates.

Sandra Chevrier

Chevrier creates what she refers to as “masks” and “cages” from these comic book excerpts, exploring both the external dictates and self-imposed restrictions to which the feminine is subject. Her confine metaphor of scripted identity problematizes the reductive social roles ascribed to women. Chevrier works with a combination of acrylic, watercolor, graphite, china ink, pastels, and collage to create complex sequences of imagery. Each portrait is developed intuitively and offers a simultaneity of scripts: heroism and weakness, beauty and imperfection, order and chaos, revelation and withholding. Chevrier is interested in the flaws in these narratives and seeks comic book references that capture moments of vulnerability and contention: failures in the hero and chinks in his otherwise unassailable armor.

A constant dance takes place in these works. Fiction bleeds in and out of reality, and several competing narratives obscure the identity of the subject. Ultimately, the imaginary and the real are equally unreliable in their deceptions and Chevrier’s portraits capture the multidimensional mire of this human fraudulence. The constant pressure to perform clearly defined roles is at odds with our true nature: we are all heroes and villains, successes and failures. Each face, each body and each self is a patchwork of conflicting stories.

Sandra Chevrier

Sandra Chevrier

Sandra Chevrier