Bubblegum Club

Tag: young artist

  • Street art in Egypt with Aya Tarek

    “I used to say I’m not political, but I realised that everything you do is political. Walking down the street is political,” she says. “So, it is political, but it doesn’t have to be propaganda.”

    Although much attention was given to Egyptian street art after the revolution in 2011, the trigger for the Arab Spring, street artist Aya Tarek has been making work since 2008 when she was just 18 years old. She found her fine art classes at the Alexandria University too restricting, and so she cleaned up her grandfather’s studio and invited her friends over to experiment with non-traditional art forms. The walls all over Alexandria soon became her canvas.

    “I think Downtown Alexandria inspired everything I do. The architecture from back then was really great. I used to hang out and see these amazing buildings in Art Deco. Even during the 90s, the city was stuck in the 60s, so the comics I used to buy were from the 60s. Everything was time capsuled in this era and we didn’t have anything else. So it was like I was in a different era, in this era,” Tarek explains in an interview with Cairo Scene.

    Challenging the institutionalized approach to art creation and art display, her work has seen her travel to Beirut, Berlin, Cologne and Frankfurt. Her work has seen her recognized as one of the first serious street artists from Alexandria. This caught the attention of independent filmmaker Ahmed Abdallah, and led to Tarek being featured in the film Microphone, which explores Alexandria’s art scene.

    Tarek participated in a successful exhibition titled White Wall Beirut where she and a number of other street artists from around the world were invited to create work in the Beirut Art Centre, as well as around the city. Receiving a positive response to her work, Tarek commented that she prefers making work on the streets and not within exclusive art walls. By creating work on the streets people who are intimidated by galleries and museums are able to engage with her work.

    Her contribution to the White Wall exhibition

    While Tarek appreciates the attention given to artists after the revolution in 2011, she tries to shy away from making her work directly political. She explains that she would like her work to seen for its artistic value and not simply because she is an Arab woman creating work within a highly contested political environment. Despite this desire she acknowledges the fact that existing and creating cannot be divorced from politics.

    Check out more of her work on Facebook.

  • Masixole Ncevu – capturing city living

    Masixole Ncevu creates work in charcoal and video, but his photography is taking centre sage at the moment. Having moved to Johannesburg from Cape Town last year, he has been photographing the sprawling metropolis and the vibrant characters that inhabit it. I interviewed him about how his move to Johannesburg has allowed him to embrace colour photography, and work on putting a book together.

    You work in charcoal and video as well but your photography seems to be taking centre stage at the moment. Could you share more about your relationship with photography and how it has evolved?

    Having been fascinated by black and white photography from an early age, I prefer to use charcoal for my drawings. My style is heavily influenced by my love for human figures and by my own emotions.  Whether I draw a close up or full portrait, I immensely enjoy the creativity and freedom of expression that comes with it. My love for video/short films comes from me continuously trying to challenge myself to find different ways of creating and enhancing the visual impact of my work. For me whether or not I succeed in that it is up to the subjective responsiveness of the viewer but the process of getting there is worth all the hard work and that for me is both deeply therapeutic and emotional.

    You also recently moved to Johannesburg from Cape Town. Could you please share more about the decision to do so and how this has affected your artistic practice?

    I felt the need to challenge myself because I was starting to feel too comfortable with the familiarity of Cape Town. I’m really passionate about traveling and Johannesburg is the beginning of that journey. I chose Johannesburg because it is the melting part of cultures and traditions and it is the gateway to Africa. I’ve always been interested in fashion and the move to Johannesburg has also created a shift in my work from black and white documenting, to embracing colour photography, as a means to express the vibrancy of Johannesburg’s street fashion.

    You are working on a book at the moment. Could you please share more about what the book will contain and how you have made progress with it so far?

    I’m treating the book as a work in progress. My intention for the book is to be a portrait of Johannesburg but the exact nature of the book will reveal itself as the work progresses.

    I have been looking at the work you have been sharing on Tumblr. Are these images part of what will be included in your book? Or are these separates series?

    It maybe a collection of photographs from the projects or I may end up choosing one of the projects that I feel represents Johannesburg in more a powerful way.

    I noticed that a lot of your photographic projects are works in progress. Is this a reflection of how you work and how you approach your photography?

    When I start a project/series I don’t immediately think ‘OK this is my next big project/series’. I just use photography as a way to investigate something that holds my interest. I respond to things I feel moved by or that I feel politicized by. Sometimes it works itself into a project/series, sometimes it doesn’t. I treat all of my projects as works in progress, and keep exploring them until I feel that I have told the story in a meaningful way.

    You have quite a few projects that you have been working on this year which I have seen on your Tumblr. Could you share more about your series “Sunday Street”? Where did the inspiration for this come from?

    I find peoples spiritual believes to be a fascinating part of the human condition. I’m interested in exploring how different people express their faith and I’m particularly in interested in how people in Johannesburg mix their western Christian beliefs with their traditional ancestral practice. So initially what drew me to make this photograph was their striking church clothes.

    From the series ‘Sunday Street’, Johannesburg, July 2017

    Could you share more about your series “Back seat”?

    In Cape Town my primary means of public transport were trains but since moving to Johannesburg I’ve been using taxis as a means of exploring the city. The scenes I was experiencing while using taxis reminded me of the work of Micheal Wolf from the project ‘Tokyo compression’. My interest was sparked when I witnessed two passengers fighting for the back seat and it made me wonder why that seat was a hot property.

    From the series ‘Back seat’, Johannesburg, July 2017

    Could you share more about your series “Trousers”?

    Johannesburg has a rich history of Pantsula, Swankas and Omashesha, a style taken from the ’60s and ’70s associated with gangsters and street dancers. Since I’ve always been interested in street fashion moving to Johannesburg has given the opportunity to explore the style.

    From the series ‘Trousers’, Johannesburg, 2017

    What is particularly interesting is how you have chosen to pair/group your images on your Tumblr and website. Could you share a bit more about these choices?

    I intentionally group my images in order to create a visual link between them, so that they can tell a complete story. When I present an image on its own, I do so when it tells a story on its own.

    Is there anything specific that readers should look out for from you this year?

    I’m participating in a group exhibition in Nimes, France (Nov 2017 – Feb 2018) with a photography gallery called NegPos. There is also a possibility of a group exhibition in London on the horizon (October 2017) but I will keep people posted on all my social media.

     

     

  • Lauren Opia – taking to the streets of Johannesburg one eye at a time

    The streets of Newtown, Braam, Maboneng and Troyeville carry the mark of Opia and her haunting eye illustrations. Lauren Opia is the 19-year-old graffiti artist coming from a private school background. Practicing art in a scene commonly thought of as a boys club she contributes to giving girl culture new meaning.

    Opia was born in Johannesburg and has lived in the city her entire life. Expressing that she has always leaned more towards the creative side, she has enjoyed making art ever since she can remember.  Opia tells me that when she started with art, she never had a distinct point that she was hoping to convey. From a young age Opia was continuously expressing herself with art because of the gratification she got from it, despite the fact that there aren’t creative people in her family.

    Stating that she is unsure of how her passion for graffiti was ignited, she believes that it was a mixture of influences. Opia has been exposed to a large amount of graffiti art from living in Jo’burg, a city that has an abundance of murals and graffiti art that regularly shape shifts into newer displays. Going through a hip hop culture phase, she desired most of all to do art that was different from what the rest of the kids sharing her background were doing.

    “I definitely didn’t think that I would take this route.  If someone were to tell me three years ago that I would be a graffiti artist, I would have just laughed and shrugged it off.”

    Opia expresses that it took time to develop her style, and that she is persistently working on improving and perfecting it.  “When I started painting, I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my own work.  I focused too much on being like other artists and thinking about what other people would like to see.  It was only when I started using the colours that I like and started painting what I would like to see painted in the city that my style began to develop.  Ironically, people then started to like my work more anyway.”

    The word ‘Opia’ is a fabricated word created by a psychologist signifying the abstruse intensity of looking into someone’s eyes. A feeling that can be experienced as invasive and vulnerable in chorus.  Opia explains that she chose this pseudonym, as it is how she feels when creating her work for the public to see, as well as the fact that it ties in with the use of eyes in her graffiti pieces that are her signature. “Just like most artists, I put a lot of myself into my art so sharing it with others is quite terrifying. However, I hope that there are some people that feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable when viewing my graffiti instead of it just being a background for a teenager’s selfie.”

    Opia has a tendency to make use of blues and purples with traces of yellows and pinks in her work. In our interview Opia communicated to me that her process is particularly intuitive and that she does not have a meaning in mind when she initially starts transforming the canvases that she works on; the walls of the city she sees around her. Her work is comprised of surreal worlds, worlds that are an escape for her, and are an expression of what is going on in her mind.

    Identifying as a tomboy and growing up with boys has contributed to Opia’s comfort in the graffiti scene commonly thought of as a men’s world. “Obviously, being a girl, it’s a lot more dangerous for me to go out and paint somewhere, especially in town.  So unfortunately I don’t paint in public places as frequently as I would like to.  That is the only negative side to it.  Being a female in a mostly male-dominated subculture has made me an anomaly that has provided a wave of opportunities which I’m really grateful for.”

    Opia expresses that despite her introverted nature she finds a significant deal of inspiration from people. Other facets that inspire her work are cinematography and interesting set designs in films. She tells me that Mars (a Johannesburg based graffiti artist) has been an inspiration and motivation for her. Opia believes that his colour palettes, fades,compositions and line work are perfect and what all artists strive for.

    The young graffiti artist’s message for other young women wanting to pursue the art is to, “Practice, practice, practice.” Opia has met a number of people that told her that they had tried to spray paint but couldn’t get it right. “Just like all other media, spray paint is something that is not perfected after a couple of hours.  I still have a long way to go but each time I paint it gets easier and I learn more. Don’t feel pressured to do what other artists are doing.  Just paint something that you are passionate about. It will give you more fulfillment and it will show in your work.”

    At the moment Opia is taking a gap year and has taken on design internships, practicing art, looking for inspiration and doing short courses.

  • Jéad Stehr // FUTURE 76

    Born at the turn of the century, eighteen year old chocolate-ice-cream-eating and mom to seven cats, Jéad Stehr captures her reality through the photographic lens. In between working for a record label and the occasional episode of American Gods, the young artist explores social and gender issues through her practice of poetry and photography.

    “At about the age of nine or ten I started writing stories and poems, things like that. I also started entering them in competitions.” Instead of putting the traditional pen to paper, “I like typing things”. She often stores an entire anthology on her cell phone. Initially writing down her stream of consciousness and then engaging in a rigorous editing process afterwards: carving out the words until a poem is fully formed.

    Two years later, Jéad began her photography career after pocketing her dad’s camera. “After I took my dad’s camera…one of the videographers came down from I think Nigeria. He saw me playing around with the camera and he said ‘nah girl, you need to learn how to use this camera properly.’ So he like sat me down and gave me a whole day for the basics on how to shoot and change settings on this camera. Then I just felt so committed to it.”

    Thematically, her work revolves around the notion of self-narration. “I focus a lot on the things going on around me. Majority of the work is a reflection of what has happened to me…A series I did called Femme looked at the duel sides of femininity. In masculinity there can be femininity – the two shouldn’t be separated from one another. It was a whole video project as well as a photo series…I painted the entire room pink, it was the first concept shoot I ever did. Like I stole cactuses from neighbours in the middle of the night – I wanted to create an image by filling the whole space.”

    “That’s what I love doing, tying all the concepts to my own life.” Through this project and micro-residency she hopes to, “inspire other people to take the youth seriously and invest in local talent as well.”

    Photography by Jéad Stehr

    Untitled:

    thank you for telling me what to feel.

    who to be. what to do.

    working together can be a learning experience. we both get what we want.

    you need me to do a task i perform it. carry it through. create life from dry husks.

    fix. refix. adjust. simplify. capture. waste time.

    “it’s easy work”

    “i promise it will be quick”

    “i need a favor”

    “i need you”

    words that seduce you into it.

    working relationships with you will never be equal.

    in your eyes i can complete everything you want.

    in your eyes you also see me bound to the work.

    never asking for gratitude, a reward. something in return.

    in your eyes you’ve earned the privilege to demand miracles.

    you expect it to be done.

    in your eyes i’m both reliable and unreliable.

    crucial when needed, forgotten ignored when the task is done.

    i fall into the trap of the servile nature.

    the answer to the

    “how can we make it work?”

    “who will do this?”

    “i have a vision but can’t complete it.”

    the answer to questions not even asked.

    i become so use to it.

    i think 10 steps ahead.

    i offer help. i take the blame. the insults.

    the difficult parts that

    “no one else could do”

    expectations are constant.

    don’t meet them. fail.

    i caused you to fail.

    accusations. understanding is for others, but for me there will be none.

    our relationship so ancient in its chains of obedience.

    one way talk.

    “you have not been recognized.”

    “you have not said that.”

    ideas grown from my brain, branded with another name.

    shift blame. who will be next?

    take this. carry that. work. harder. push yourself. worn out.

    “you have no reason to be tired”

    eat healthier. have fun. enjoy your life.

    “what else could you possibly want to do?”

    “you would be bored at home”

    bored. boring. synonymous with peace.

    a lifestyle i wish for.

    sacrifice your boredom for the profit of others.

    expect nothing in return.

    so that when they thank you it’s a surprise instead of common courtesy.

    did you really think they would see you as anything more than a step, mule, tap, slave.

    remember respect is for others not you.

  • Blake Daniels // A Visual Mythology of Tales from Here and Later

    Layers of line and form shapeshift under the veil of indigo ambiguity. Punctuated by palpable desire. Unapologetically queering time and space into a non-linear dimension. A place beyond and between grand narratives. A collage of fiction and fact. Deconstructing familial function. A palette of gender and sexual fluidity. The painted surface of an imagined reality.

    Warm ambient light radiated from glowing orbs as the last drops of the Summer rainfall pitter-pattered on the glass window in a cozy corner café. In between the interjecting sounds of the mechanical coffee grinder, Blake delved into the Tales from Here and Later. His solo exhibition made its debut at the experimental ROOM Gallery in New Doorfontein. A continent away from his Midwestern Catholic upbringing, Blake explores a deconstruction of gender, performance and desire in this new body of work.

    The large-scale painted works are part of a personal mythology, rooted in experience as a ravenous rupture of yearning and a deep exploration of self. The cathartic process visually articulates narratives of craving in a complex visual form where words do not suffice. Blake began painting in 2009 and is constantly seeking to push the medium as far as its conceptual plasticity will go. He often subtlety blends ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, layering a personal intertextuality onto the canvas. “Folding into space”, through the mechanism of story-telling.

    bonfire,boogie,burn_oiloncanvas_188x164_2016_www.blakedaniels.com
    Blake Daniels, Bonfire, Boogie, Burn (2016)

     

    The abstraction of human form articulates changeable characters – amalgamated portraits of both artist and viewer. Through reading the work one constructs a, “queer lineage of yourself”. Established through a vicarious and semi-imagined space. Visceral reactions are elicited through Blake’s use of colour. A spectrum of tones conceal and reveal residue of humanoid forms and ghostly figures. Granting a metaphysical weight to “the endless death of being human”.

    Blake resists the sanitization of ‘queer’ as a homogenized catchphrase, and instead attempts to de/reconstruct alternative articulations through a visual vocabulary to engage in radical gender theory. The potency of imagery is utilized through disrupting linear narratives and probing personal nuance to complicate queer histories of here and later.

     

     

    Blake Daniels, Third Sister (2016)
    Blake Daniels, Third Sister (2017)

  • ‘These Aesthetics Are Not New’ – exhibition by artist Callan Grecia

    Young artist Callan Grecia, having recently graduated with his Masters in Painting at UCKAR, is exploring the relationship network conditions in a Post-Internet society have on the medium of oil paint. I interviewed him about his show titled These Aesthetics Are Not New (2017).

    Tell our readers about the title you chose for your exhibition, ‘These Aesthetics Are Not New’.

    The title for the show came from the idea that everything comes from something. There is nothing new in an age of instantaneous access where we are constantly exposed and re-exposed to images like never before. If you look at fashion, music and art, things are cyclical and the Internet is a catalyst for this effect to occur faster and faster. I guess I was also tired of hearing and seeing the same shit over and over, heralded as ‘new’ and ‘fresh’ until you do some digging and see that you can’t really escape the languages of visual literacy that have been engrained in us consciously and subconsciously.

    Tell our readers what the exhibition was about.   

    I’ll be honest I can’t really pinpoint things in that way because this exhibition seems to be the first step in a larger, longer process of exploration and learning, but I can say that the work deals with ideas of wish fulfillment, brought about by the instantaneous access of the Internet. The image object is also a concept I’ve been exploring, basically the image as object and the object as image and the convergence of the two (digital media and physical painted works). The work becomes a vehicle for network conditions in that it takes from this space, replicates digital aesthetics in a physical space and is then able to either be reintroduced into the digital space, or not depending on how and where the slippages between the two occur.

    _MG_0104

    What are some of the Post-internet conditions/cultural aspects that you have focused on for your exhibition? Tell our readers about your decision to use paintings, t-shirts, installed elements and an immersive sound piece in your exhibition.

    Curatorial considerations to include these elements were based on the feedback loop of the Internet, and the t-shirts with prints of the paintings on the walls on them, coupled with installed vinyl that spoke to internet slang, blaring rap music and cellphone notifications created this immersive, layered space that replicated the speed and frantic nature of the world within the screen.

    Tell our readers about your decision to live stream your exhibition on Instagram.

    The instagram live stream was essentially the last layer, which became the re-induction of the work into a digital space. It also provided instantaneous access to the paintings but with a heavy digital grain that changed the way the works would be read IRL. It was a conscious decision that paid off conceptually and also had the advantage of allowing people who could not make the opening night a chance to see the show from their own spaces.

    What were some of the responses to your work at the gallery vs on Instagram?

    The abstraction came into its own for the viewers who got to see them in the flesh and the figurative work was what got the most attention on instagram. The grain of the digital tends to have a flattening effect and the devices these images are viewed on lend themselves to figuration. You can’t really pick up on the intricacies of the abstract works on instagram, or feel their size, presence and depth, whereas you can easily recognize and appreciate figuration, I believe, on a mobile platform.

    Check out Callan’s online catalogue to see more of his work or follow him on Instagram to some of his work’s in progress.

    _MG_0170

    _MG_0189

    _MG_0103