send us your email address:
E-Mail:
Jim Avignon paints the Bushwick Art Park for Pictoplasma's Character Walk
& Jon Burgerman creates the Garden of Eden
November, 2011
Photo Essay by Ali Ha
This November Jim Avignon painted the Bushwick Art Park for Pictoplasma's Character Walk event. He worked for a week during the sunny autumn daylight of late October. With classic Jim Avignon representations of American sayings in a bright colorful mashups of characters. Jim Avignon's mural will be on view thru 2012.
Below are photos of Jim Avignon's week painting the 200ft Bushwick Art Park:
While Jim Avignon painted the Bushwick Art Park, we had our good friend Jon Burgerman paint the courtyard of Factory Fresh for Pictoplasma's Character Walk event. Jon created the Garden of Eden in our courtyard with Adam and creatures from the begining of time in a Bushwick tribute piece. Jon Burgerman's mural will be on view till November 20th & beyond.
Below are photos of Jon Burgerman painting the Factory Fresh Courtyard:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Stain, Billy Mode & Pat Voke paint the Bushwick Art Park
August, 2011
Photo Essay by Ali Ha
Childhood friends Chris Stain, Billy Mode & Pat Voke for years have worked together as "In the Dream", a collaborative mural project group. During July 28 thru August 2nd they painted the Bushwick Art Park on Vandervoort Place. Factory Fresh was the first stop of their summer tour. To conquer the 25’ x 200’ wall Bill broke out the paint sprayer to cover some ground. Then the group collaborated and painted the lettering over the 5 days. The mural will be up till the end of August.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Veng paints the Bushwick Art Park
June 4, 2011 Bushwick Open Studios event
Photo Essay by Ali Ha
Our good friend and fellow NYer Veng was a one man machine, Veng conquered the 25’ x 200’ wall in five long day/nights. He buffed and painted the entire wall by himself. He told us it was his mission to have no intern/helpers. He wanted to paint Old School, just him and the wall. The wall was ready intime for our Bushwick Art Park event which opened during the Bushwick Open Studio weekend event. Veng's dreamy world of people and bird houses was in corallation with our Surrealist show inside the gallery during the month of June. This mural is up until the end of July, 2011.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jaques Frague & Yakita Fields paint the Bushwick Art Park
Photo Essay by Ali Ha
As part of the continuing mural series on Vandervoort Place curated by Factory Fresh we had artist Jaques Frague & Yakita Fields paint for the month of March 2011. Jaques Frague & Yakita Fields grew up on a Pueblo Reservation in New Mexico. We got lucky and it was great weather while they were visiting. They came and painted for the entire weekend. We discussed there art and I learned a mission of theres is to dispell the view of Native American art culture and show that is isn't all wolves and indians. I really enjoy their work and below are some photos of their process over the weekend.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Talking Evil with Jeremiah Maddock and Amanda Wong: A Short Review
Written by team member Ksenia Baranova
The show SEENOEVILSEENOEVILSEE EVIL raises many questions, but answers none directly. The artists Jeremiah Maddock and Amanda Wong are equally elusive, however they did agree to answer a few questions. Jeremiah and Amanda have been collaborating together in various projects for the past couple of years and it really shows: between Jeremiah, Amanda and Daniel, the walls of Factory Fresh have been transformed into one seamless, often nightmarish vision.
The newcomer Amanda Wong is an installation artist and a native New Yorker as well as currently a Junior at Parsons School of Design. To get into the semi-hidden installation room it’s necessary to crouch down through a low opening and then you’re in a murky, incense infused, and frankly perfectly creepy living room, down to the skipping player, and the pickled pig fetus jars on the wall. Part of the multi-media installation involves a “soundscape” made though the mixing and cutting of vinyl: funky, broken beats. While explaining the idea behind the room Amanda emphasized that the installation itself is a look at the closely interwoven relationship between humans and animals, though it could also be seen as a good look at the fetishization our culture has with the occult.
Amanda hopes "the viewer’s experience of the installation will both intrigue
as well as raise questions on their own stance in this relationship."
The work of both Jeremiah and Daniel are incorporated in Amanda’s installation, something that would have been impossible if all three weren’t closely related in theme. As it is, the three artists are able to combine their energy into a potently macabre, visually rich environment. The work featured in the show by Jeremiah Maddock was completed only in the last couple of months, and although his style is highly recognizable, it’s hard to pinpoint a clear description. Hypnotic might be a good word, obsessive too.
Although this is Jeremiah’s second show at Factory Fresh when asked about his ties to the Brooklyn art world he answered that he still didn’t really see himself as part of the hip Brooklyn crowd, instead he refers to himself as an “outsider”, and to his work as “outsider art.” Though he originally hails from the West coast, Jeremiah has been settled in Brooklyn for some time now. Maddock describes his studio as a menagerie of thousands of semi-broken markers, pens, and felt-tips that are never discarded, but kept for later use.
When asked about his interest in using discarded book covers and paper in his work Jeremiah had a very straight forward answer.
"When I first came to New York I was surprised by the amount of abandoned books I found in the streets."
By taking off the covers and making his work on their backs, Jeremiah has been able to avoid contributing to this waste. Using the recycled book covers is another way Jeremiah adds a transformative element to his mesmerizing work: building his weathered colors upon an already richly layered product of time and use.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tell Your Mom about Roa
Written by team member Margaret Boykin
So, I'll be honest- my mother doesn't know a lot about street art, and like most people who don't know a lot about street art, she tends to get very confused when she hears about my job at Factory Fresh. "I don't get it..." she asked me with a concerned frown, "if it's street art, how do you put it in a gallery?"
Her question, albeit irking, is a valid one. How do you translate a kind of art whose weight seems to exist symbiotically with its urban setting onto the white, uniform walls of a gallery? Where is street art's place within an art establishment, and how do you organize it in a traditional setting without losing its confrontational nature? Well, turns out Roa knows the answer, and it's very apparent in his first solo show at Factory Fresh, where he manages to harness the unique qualities of art found outside and bring them inside.
Roa's work is instantaneously impressive in a way that framed, museum art cannot be. Push through the gallery's doors and you're instantly dwarfed by the rat that ate Manhattan, a lurking rabbit and an enormous bird. You know you're inside a gallery, but the quivering animals surrounding you on found-material canvases of scrap wood and metal beg to differ, making you wonder if you've stumbled into some sort of junkyard jungle.
In a total of ten pieces inside the gallery and a finale piece on the back wall outside, Roa shows us rats, birds, skeletons and blood vessels, all rendered larger than life in a style that somehow resembles both a scientific drawing and a gestural sketch, dripping like it was just slapped down but forming detailed anatomy. Look closer and you'll notice the work is viewer-interactive, with small doors and flip-sides to the animals that move away to reveal organs and vessels. There is a constant element of the unexpected in Roa's work, both in the subject matter of the pieces and their quirky construction- you open a door to find bare bones, move a block of wood to discover a beating heart.
Roa's art can remain "street art" even within a gallery because it maintains a sense of environmental dischord. In the same way that it is jarring to see a Banksy or Eine stencil on your way to the bus stop, it's jarring to see a giant bird taking over a gallery wall. Street art has the tension of confrontation with the unexpected, and Roa understands that moment and brings the same displacement to Factory Fresh's walls. His hares and rats aren't re-appropriated from pop culture but taken from a deeper place, picked out of forests and pastures that our urban existence knows nothing of. In a city where people (okay, well, me) shriek when a rat scampers over the subway track, Roa takes the life that is hidden in the holes of industrial grime and monumentalizes it, its individual hairs brushing the wood, its blood pumping in front of you, unexpected and impressive and overwhelming. Roa harnesses the discord between the two environments of urban and natural to create pieces that are engaging and interesting.
After seeing the show (and insisting on posing for photos in which she mimed high-fiving/kissing many of Roa's animals) my mother, the initial skeptical inquirer, nodded at me. "Well, I get it now. I mean, this stuff is just cool."
And it is. Even if his work isn't scaling an abandoned building, even if you know nothing about the artist- his Belgian upbringing, his interest in the relationship between urban and natural environments, his impressive ability to work with a cigarette in one hand and a spray can in the other, Roa's work is just plain cool. And instead of going on an awkwardly worded explanation about how you remove street art from the street and maintain its magnitude, I'm now able to slap down a pocket photo of any one of Roa's work as tacit explanation. Artists like Roa are why street art works, so tell your moms and other street art ignoramuses to check it out- this man knows how it's done.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Factory Fresh's Ali Ha and Ad Deville were on the Radio Wednesday, May 26 for a half hour segment on Citywide a WNYU program with host Lucas Green.
Please note: The first minute of our radio interview has music in the background which gradually fades away.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Intern's Perspective on DAMAGE:CONTROL in its last weeks: Final Consensus?
Hurry down to Factory Fresh, if only to look under the dress.
Written by team member Margaret Boykin
Granted, my position as a first time intern at Factory Fresh does leave me writing this semi-review blog post with a bit of a bias, but even if I were an impartial party, my feelings would be the same: Something great is going on here. DAMAGE:CONTROL, featuring work by the talented and acclaimed Boris Hoppek and elusive Alex Diamond, is worth seeing. The review in L magazine said it best when they described the show's artist mash-up- "Factory Fresh [has] developed a real knack for pairing artists in an interesting, provocative way."
Provocative is right. Before we get into the dirty stuff, the layout of the show itself is provocative, predominantly because of the central figure: a wedding dress of Cinderella-worthy poof hangs from the ceiling. Sitting at my station in the back of the gallery, I watched as several people stopped outside the glass front windows and stared, perhaps confusing Factory Fresh for a dress shop. However, the artwork on the walls denies this connotation fervently. Hoppek's photos...well, the word "provocative" doesn't even do them justice. Coffins, pacifiers, and what looks like a morph suit are involved. Beyond the initial shock of Hoppek's nude subjects, the posed "Suicide Girls" (their label, not his- all the models are fierce tattooed beauties, pictured and featured on their website that celebrates an alternative aesthetic. See more @ suicidegirls.com), there are sleek, simple compositions at work, of the same minimalistic style exhibited in Hoppek's drawings. Although these small drawings aren't as immediately jarring the way full color female genitalia tend to be, they could almost be considered intriguing cartoon-like versions of Hoppek's photos. The depicted rag doll character is subjected not only to similar positioning and exposure to that of the Suicide Girls, but also beds of nails and reapers. There's something disturbing and a little bit poignant about these drawings- especially in my personal favorite, the pair of Untitled pieces where the small figure cranes dramatically backwards, arching its little back to look wistfully at a floating heart. Despite the blatancy of some aspects to the drawing, there is subtle emotion communicated in a way that is not at all clichéd- it's just the way they make you feel. Hoppek's pieces featured in this exhibition manage to be at once both diverse and connected, presented in varied media with a thread of common subject matter- a thread that lends itself to tying into Alex Diamond's pieces nicely.
Diamond's pieces range from a series he literally put on the wall himself in the front room of the gallery to his and Hoppek's joint works in the back room. The pieces in the
front room form a dynamic wall collage with dramatic splashes of orange paint. Diamond's juxtaposition of his drawn, dreamy, fluid figures on a background of what looks like magazine clippings of people seems like Hoppek's two styles combined. It's easy to see why Hoppek and Diamond are a good match. Their work communicates with each other, and your walk through the gallery seems to follow the development of the two artists' relationship, culminating in quirky and confusing yet fluid collaborations in the back room.
There is much more to be impressed by in DAMAGE:CONTROL than I can fit into a concise witty blog post. This is your chance to see (and perchance purchase?
Some of Hoppek's photos and Diamond's drawings run on the almost-affordable side, depending where you fall on the poor-student to wealthy-adult spectrum) an engaging, dynamic show at an unpretentious gallery- don't miss it, and don't forget to look under the dress.
The DAMAGE:CONTROL show ends April 11
Margaret Boykin is a student at Barnard College of Columbia, pursuing a double major in Art History and English. She currently writes for the Columbia Spectator.
Margaret is also the newest member of Factory Fresh.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 2010 brought us German artist Boris Hoppek and the elusive Alex Diamond who traveled from Europe to show at
Factory Fresh and the Volta Art Fair during March.
Photo Essay by team member DA Stover
Alex Diamond at work, we never saw his face he wore this ski mask/jumpsuit the entire time.
Boris Hoppek working on selecting drawings for the exhibition at Factory Fresh.
Boris Hoppek's pile of work selected for Volta.
Alex Diamond painting in the front room.
Alex Diamond and Boris Hoppek
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK 100 AND FEAST PRE-PARTY IS HERE!
Factory Fresh has been chosen as one of the NEWYork100. NEWYork100 highlights 100 of the most innovative, rule-breaking, model-changing people, ideas, and companies to come out of the Big Apple.
All Day Buffet presents The New York 100 & Feast Pre-Party! Come join us to celebrate the innovators, social entrepreneurs, and creative mavericks that make up the NY100, and to throw down for The Feast Pre-Party. RSVP is required and the secret location will be emailed on Monday, September 14th.
We're also throwing in a little "Cause for Drinks" action. Proceeds from certain drinks will benefit Goods for Good. And we'll be launching a 24-hour campaign on Tuesday where we'll donate even more money (stay tuned for details)!
Come drink for a cause, and party with a purpose. Everyone is invited, so spread the word by tweeting, facebooking, etc.
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
6 PM - 9 PM
Free
Secret Location