Civilian Exhibition at HLP

My first solo exhibition with Harlan Levey Projects was titled Civilian, and ran from November 16th to December 27th, 2017. A confluence of events afforded me some extra installation time which I used to prototype a sculptural piece that had been in the back of my mind. I think it really helped the installation and I look forward to creating more sculptural works in the future.

The front room consisted of 3, floor to ceiling, wheatpasted Collisions images. Each of these images augmented which brought you into the public where so much of my work takes place or originates. Below you were 22 bus shelter advertisements taken from the streets of Brussels over the course of a week. The advertisement was for Prima Donna, a women's lingerie company.

In the next room were 4 Labor pieces, 1 large Titan Smash piece, and the aforementioned sculpture which I titled 115 Fluorescent Tubes. Each of these pieces required me to steal advertising infrastructure. The most subtle works were the Labor series which start with me taking the plexiglass that normally lies behind outdoor advertising and which diffuses the fluorescent lights into an even illumination. These pieces of plexiglass are meticulously cleaned and then sanded to take on the appearance of soft marble. I then also take selected advertisements and paint out all of the text leaving only the image or product behind. The sanded plexiglass sheets are then placed on top of the image, one after another, until the image is almost illegible, leaving only the faintest trace for you to decipher.

In contrast to that work was the Titan Smash work which is made by stealing the Titan signs which adorn most NYC phonebooths to label to company who owns the booth. These signs are then smashed, reassembled, and cased in resin so that the sharp edges of the signs protrude from the frames. With all five parts, the piece stood a little over 8' x 4'.

And last was the prototype work that I created on site by removing 115 fluorescent lights from over 40 outdoor advertising locations around Brussels. Over the course of 3 days I carefully walked circles out from the gallery and back along a different path collecting bulbs along the way. Placed on a small stand and middle column that held the ballasts and wiring, the lights were wrapped in black furniture bands and simply stood upright in the gallery. The inner 12 bulbs were illuminated so that the bundle glowed from within.

For me the back room, and in particular the 115 fluorescent light's sculpture excited me as an artist. Had I made the sculpture using purchased materials, it would have been a nice lamp, but having taken the lights without permission I had transformed them into objects that could warrant conversation and dialogue. It was like small alchemy and one of the first pieces that I think is truly whole.

Read a review of the exhibition [HERE]

Collisions Exhibition June 15th 6-9PM Openwalls Gallery

I am very happy to announce that I will be exhibiting the entire Collisions series on June 15th at Openwalls Gallery in Berlin. This ongoing series has been in the making for the past 2 years and includes 15 photographs, each with an augmented reality component. Along side the photographs there will be a small a small amount of ephemera and a beautifully conceived essay by Thomas Dekeyser. Please join us between 6-9pm for the opening reception.

 Collisions: Underground, 2016

 Collisions: Carry On, 2017

Is the Poster Dead, or Just Remediated?

I am extremely excited to be a part of the 50th Warsaw International Poster Biennale coming up this June. A huge thanks to Vermibus for introducing me to David Crowley, the curator and mind behind this unique exhibition which looks like as if it will honor the posters role in political activism while investigating the new forms it has taken in an increasingly digital, and mediated environment. 

Professor David Crowley, Head of Critical Writing in Art & Design, has a long-term research interest in the poster as both a design object and a means of communication. RCA Blog talked to David about his curation of the fiftieth Warsaw International Poster Biennale in June 2016, and the changing faces of poster design and dissemination in the digital twenty-first century. More [HERE]

Contemporary Art Stavanger Interview

Big thanks to Heather Jones for taking the time to listen to me rant on and on about my work. 

VIA: Contemporary Art Stavanger

The now ubiquitous Stavanger-based street art initiative Nuart, in partnership with Stavanger Aftenbladet, has recently branched out to include yet another platform for public art: a large-scale billboard located in the heart of Stavanger that presents a rotation of short-term installations by commissioned local and international artists. More [HERE]

New PublicAdCampaign Street/Gallery Work - Collisions 2015

In 2015 I installed three simple black and white designs over three consecutive advertising panels in order to create a stark contrast with the environment that would arrest viewers and allow them to see that an intervention had taken place. I have since then continued to make interventions using this same design motif, calling it the Collisions series. Here are a few images from that series thus far. 

I have also been experimenting with Augmented Reality and my gallery work so if you are feeling ambitious, download the PublicAdCampaign app (700mb) for iOS [HERE] and Android [HERE] Once you launch the app, point it at any of the images below and enjoy some extra content buried in the digital world. 

NYC, 2015

Berlin, 2015

Paris, 2015

Paris, 2015

Barcelona, 2015

Brussels, 2015

Brussels, 2015

London, 2015

London, 2015

London, 2015

London, 2015

Paris, 2015

Collaboration with OX, Paris 2015

Augmented Reality and New Gallery Works

The works presented below should also be viewed with a free augmented reality app, PublicAdCampaign Now! downloadable for Android [HERE]. 

I have been working on a new series of gallery pieces that focus on my long term struggle to take back outdoor advertising spaces without imposing my own aesthetics on the public or running an ad campaign for myself, while at the same time making visible my tactics in the hopes of promoting similar behavior in others. I do this to ask whether or not we should adorn our cities with commercial messages in light of the many other types of visual stimulus we could offer ourselves, and with the understanding that advertising in general has a net negative effect on our personal psychology and thus our global behavior as a species. 

These works are as close as I think I have come to reaching that goal for a number of reasons. First, while people who are familiar with my work may look at these installations and assume it was me, I think thier utter simplicity anonymizes my actions and prevents the installation from being promotional. If you don't know who made the piece, you cant think about the person behind it and therefore must instead have a relationship to the image alone. That said, you must notice the installation in the first place and I think the striking difference between the imagery used for this series, and advertising, helps to create that initial interaction. 

So now we have someone looking at an anonymous installation that removed an advertisement for some unknown reason. This is the space I want the viewer to end up, as it allows them to begin the conversation with themselves about the difference between the two types of imagery, advertisings ubiquity and role in our public spaces, and all of the other questions we should be asking ourselves when thinking about how we want our public visual environment to be used. Given the opportunity to disassociate these physical locations with thier expected advertising content, viewers are free to enter a line of thinking that is almost unheard of... "Should we have, and do we need, outdoor advertising intruding on our public spaces and minds? 

While the initial performative aspect of these pieces works on the public viewer, these images are ultimately meant to hang in a gallery context, potentially loosing the credibility, and directness of the illegal physical takeover that is the proof of my ambitions. After all, these images are very clearly composites, a single moment created by compiling many hours of patient waiting into a single frame. If the images have gone through photoshop, what prevents the actual installation from being a fraud, and the proposed argument that the document depicts undeserving of our attention.

For this, the final element of AR, and the PublicAdCampaign Now! app come in to tell the rest of the story. Video of me actually installing the piece which is to become the image you are looking at in the gallery plays over the still image when viewed through the app, proving the aesthetics to be in service of the idea and the work to be sincere. Once this sincerity is established, I think the gallery viewer can come to a similar thought trajectory as the public viewer and honestly consider the proposed argument that is established by me actively breaking the law to remove commercial media and replace it with something else, whatever that might be.

Grand Opening Exhibition At Openwalls Berlin

Recently I had the pleasure of exhibiting with my new friend Vermibus at Openwalls Gallery in Berlin. His work, like my own, takes advantage of the large outdoor advertising infrastructure in our public spaces in order to tease out questions of how we choose to adorn the cities we live in. Focusing on fashion imagery, Vermibus removes, reworks, and then reinstalls fashion advertising in public spaces. It is quite effective and given my background in the fashion photography world, something that I feel strongly about supporting.

While I was in Berlin I put up a few pieces, including a quick hit with Vermibus which saw us each take a single side of a two sided bus shelter. Once I get those images together I will make them available here.

Upcoming Berlin Exhibition July 3rd 2015

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE GRAND OPENING: JORDAN SEILER (NYC) | VERMIBUS (Berlin) Celebrating its Grand Opening on July 3rd 2015, OPEN WALLS Gallery brings New York based Public Art pioneer Jordan Seiler together with European art activist Vermibus for a very special show, which consciously sets a statement against the superficial surface of today’s commercialized cityscapes and the visual pollution of outdoor advertising. Jordan Seiler already started to challenge the relationship between public spaces and commercial advertising while attending The Rhode Island School of Design in 2000 with his PublicAdCampaign, for which he took over billboards to use them as canvases for his own artworks. Over the years Seiler’s campaign has grown from an individual art project to a collective work, which peaked in the New York Street Advertising Takeover, where more than 100 participants replaced ads with artworks. Later he launched a digital equivalent with an App titled NO AD, which replaces NYC subway advertisement with curated artwork. Taking this idea even one step further Jordan Seiler and Vermibus joined forces for the NO AD DAY in November 2014, wherefore activists from all over the world were asked to remove outdoor advertisings, leaving plain white display cases as signs of the elimination of the commercial media behind. Just as in Vermibus’ individual work, in which the Berlin based artist removes ads and transforms the high gloss bikini beauties into deformed beasts, it’s the irritation of the common viewing habit that expresses his critique against the advertising industry. The OPEN WALLS Gallery Grand Opening show will gather a collection of recent works from both artists - including a multimedia segment by Seiler - as well as a photo series by Thomas von Wittich, taken from his “Dissolving Europe“ project, for which he followed Vermibus around the continent. An introduction to Ad-Busting and Public Art will be given by Jordan Seiler during the vernissage. Press & Private View Friday July 3rd. 17:00 - 18:00 Vernissage & Opening Ceremony Friday July 3rd. 18:00 - 22:00 Introduction Speech by Jordan Seiler Friday July 3rd. 19:00 Runtime 03.07.-29.07. Tuesday-Saturday 11:00-19:00 or by appointment (info@openwallsgallery.com) Additional press information, photos and video material is available upon request. Please email the gallery and we'll get back to you shortly.  http://www.vermibus.com http://publicadcampaign.com http://www.openwallsgallery.com Edit your subscription | Unsubscribe OPEN WALLS Gallery Schröderstr. 11.1 10115 Berlin

New Work for Two Upcoming Group Shows

A few years ago I was photographed by Søren Solkær in Norway for the Surface project. He set out to document the street art and graffiti artists that have helped make the genre such an important part of the art world, and came away with hundreds of portraits of some of its most influential characters. I was proud to be one of them, and even more proud to be showing with a select few at two upcoming exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. 

The first is exhibition opens tonight at Subliminal Projects, 1331 W Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles. For this exhibition, Søren asked the participating artists to integrate the original portrait he took of us into a new piece for the show. I chose to break Søren's image into two so that I could install each piece separately in a phonebooth. Once installed, each phonebooth was photographed to produce the framed diptych above. 

The second exhibition opens on May 2nd at the Allouche Gallery, 115 Spring street, NYC. For this show, the gallery wanted each participating artist to work in a 3'x3' format. Because my gallery work usually happens in stolen ad frames, 3'x3' doesn't make a lot of sense to me and so I chose to take the opportunity to do a material study built around one of my favorite objects these days, the JCDHEX Public Access key.

Public Access (Heavy Edition) in Public Data Explorer Group exhibition at HLP

Public Access, Heavy Edition, Handmade Augmented Box.

Public Data Explorer was a group exhibition at Harlan Levy Projects in Brussels, in November of 2013. I exhibited works from the Echo series, tools from the Public Access Project, and video from the most recent Re+Public project with MOMO. Alongside those works I created a handmade box called Public Access (Heavy Edition), in conjunction with my Re+Public Partner, Heavy. This box holds two of the Public Access Keys and a tablet with a single augmented reality application. That application recognizes the embossed text on the boxes lid and displays infographics which teach the user what the key is for, and how to use it.

Newest Echo Work Finally Allows the City to Show Itself

These two Echo pieces can still be seen at the Wooster 10 year anniversary show for a few more days. While the process is still the same, install, photograph, print, reinstall, repeat; I have begun to allow the city to show itself with interesting results. Not only do the characters and changing scenery allow the viewer a glimpse into my process, the whole attitude of the work changes. I am very excited to continue this project once I return from St Louis where I am currently working with MOMO on Re+Public's first ground up mural augmentation in preparation for the full application launch come Spetember 21st. Couldnt be more excited.