FEATURED ARTISTS
AARON ROSE
|
BARRY MCGEE
Barry McGee was born in 1966 in California, where he continues to work. He began creating as a young graffiti artist where he created the nickname "Twist" as his personal tag. An artist profile on McGee explains how he "view graffiti as a vital method of communication, one that keeps him in touch with a larger, more diverse audience than can be reached through the traditional spaces of a gallery or museum."
McGee graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1992, and continues to work across a diverse range of mediums from scrap wood to brick walls. Along with his late wife, Margaret Kilgallen, McGee was one of the pioneers of the Mission School art movement of the 1990s and a significant contributor to the Beautiful Losers and lowbrow art scene. |
MARGARET KILGALLEN
|
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Based in Bonny Doon, California, Thomas Campbell is self-taught visual artist who works in the mediums of painting, sculpture, photography, and filmmaking. He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in major cities around the world. His work is characterized by the juxtaposition of scribbles, slogans and stories and is focused on exploring human nature. Campbell’s paintings often feature text, expressionist brushstrokes of bold colour, characters, and graphics. In addition to his work in the visual arts, he is the creative director of an independent record label called Galaxia, which is based in California.
|
STEPHEN "ESPO" POWERS
At one time under the name ESPO ("Exterior Surface Painting Outreach"), New York City artist Powers wrote graffiti in Philadelphia and New York. This developed into his trademark style of poetics, phrasing and graphic play to create art as public messaging. Throughout the 90's he was a graffiti only artist, which was at time politically motivated both legally and illegally. After 2000, he became a studio artist and participated in international festivals, commercial projects. Motivated by public messaging and experience, his recent work explores mural art. His new book, A Love Letter to the City (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014) is a culmination of Powers' public art projects in Brooklyn and Syracuse, New York; Philadelphia; Dublin and Belfast, Ireland; S.o Paolo, Brazil, and Johannesburg, South Africa.
“The power of walls manifests itself when you’re walking past them and you see people looking at them and talking about them, and it’s about the subtle ways it impacts people’s lives.” |
CHRIS JOHANSON
Unlike fellow Mission School artists Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen, Chris Johanson received no formal art training. He learned and developed his artistic skills by painting and drawing wherever he could, on bathroom walls, skateboards and lampposts. He style is characterized by irreverent humour and bright cartoonish characters.
The prolific Chris Johanson produces paintings, zines, installations, and sculptures that are notable for their earnest, almost childlike abstraction. His work delves unabashedly into the emotional, social, and spiritual aspects of human nature, tracking points of commonality and difference using simple shapes and lines as well as an unflagging sense of magnanimous humor. (Kadist Art Foundation) |
MIKE MILLS
Best known for his film directing music videos (Air, Yoko Ono, Divine Comedy), commercials (Volkswagon, Old Spice), being the auteur of acclaimed films Thumbsuckers (2008), and the deeply autobiographical Beginners (2011), Mills is also an accomplished visual artist. His graphic vision has tempered the covers of albums (Sonic Youth, Beastie Boys), magazines, posters (Human series), and books (including wife Miranda July's No one belongs here more than you), and , and lines of clothing (Kim Gordon's X Girl). Like many of his contemporaries, there is no artistic medium that Mills hasn't explored. His work is characterized by its strong line work, clean, and sparse aesthetic with saturated colours which he first exhibited years ago at Alleged.
|
JO JACKSON
Known for her vibrant candy-coloured palate and rich graphics, Jackson's work operates on several layers, at the same time striking as it is political, iconic, jarring, and funny. She came out of San Francisco's Mission School movement, influenced by graffiti and street art. Married to fellow featured artist Chris Johanson, the two often work together in collaborative installations.
I think that [San Francisco] was particularly awesome because almost everybody was doing something or making something. I lived in D.C. before that and it felt like you had to prove that you had the right to be creative, whereas in San Francisco it's just every freak making things Lite Brite sculptures or whatever. (xlr8r.com) |
ED TEMPLETON
A former pro-skateboarder and founder of skateboard company Toy Machine, as well as a contemporary artist, Templeton is a self made creative. Residing in Huntington Beach, CA, Templeton originally hailed from Orange County. He has no formal training in art, yet is an accomplished photographer, painter and graphic designer on top of his skateboarding game. He is particularly known for his portraits of teenage culture; now distilled in two books, Teenage Smokers (1999) and Teenage Kissers (2011). In 2008 he also released a short 17 minute documentary, as collaboration with fellow artist Mike Mills, called Deformer which focuses on his life in the suburbs. He has been married to his wife Deanna, also a photographer (who he met at an Alleged show), since 1991.
|
APPEARING ARTISTS
SHEPARD FAIREY
Probably best known as the artist behind the images of Obama's 2008 candidacy campaign (most notably the iconic "HOPE" poster), Fairey's work is rightly informed by propaganda and the DIY aesthetic. His characteristic pallet is muted reds, blues, and beige tones, as well as a mixed media appearance of paste-up messaging with graphics and graffiti-inspired images. His other well-known work is the Obey logo which is a depiction of the late wrestler Andre the Giant -- this all snowballed from a sticker campaign he created in 1989 called "Andre the Giant has a posse". This campaign turned into a viral poster movement fueled by replicas by other artists pasted en masse around the globe. The OBEY image is now the centerpiece to Fairey's profitable OBEY GIANT clothing line. Fairey has been criticized by his lack of fair attribution in his work, as it mixes images of old media and messages (he often uses the McLuhan probe "The medium is the message") with graphics of his own.
Subversion of well known symbols and images for social commentary has long been a technique in my repertoire, so I’m glad to see it in the work of others... We live in a remix culture and remix is a valuable form of communication when the re-configuration makes a strong statement.” (ArtInfo: Art in the air) Web (OBEY GIANT)
|
HARMONY KORINE
New York City-based director Harmony Korine is as subversive in life as his films. Also emerging from the DIY and skateboarding tradition, Korine states in the film that he "wanted to make films he wanted to see". Noted influences are: John Cassavetes, Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Alan Clarke. A mixture of raw, disgusting, twisted and powerful, his work focuses on the lives of alternative American teenagers. Making his first movie, Kids (1995), at the age of 19, he has gone on to win numerous awards and prizes from festivals around the world, including the prestigious DOX award when Trash Humpers premiered at The Toronto International Film Festival in 2009. His work includes a steady output of cult-status films since the 90's, including: Gummo (1997), Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), and Mister Lonely (2007). His widest release to date was with most recent film, Spring Breakers (2013), which starred James Franco, Selena Gomez, and his wife Rachel Korine.
|
GEOFF MCFETRIDGE
Working out of Los Angeles, California, Geoff McFetridge is a graphic artist and director who studied graphic design at the California Institute of the Arts. Since earning his MFA, McFetridge’s work has been exhibited in galleries in various major cities worldwide. He has designed logos and graphics for ESPN, Burton Snowboards, Nike, and other companies, as well as created title graphics for filmmaker Sofia Coppola. His designs are also featured on items such as t-shirts, shoes, stickers, buttons, and album covers. He founded the design studio Champion Graphics in 1996.
|
CHERYL DUNN
Cheryl Dunn is a filmmaker and photographer based in New York City. She studied art history at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Upon completing her degree, she pursued a career in fashion photography, working for magazines such as Vogue, Elle, Harpers Bazaar, and others. Dunn’s shift to filmmaking began in the 1990s. Her first film, titled Sped (1997), documented young skateboarding and graffiti artists and went on to generate significant success at a number of film festivals. The films she has created since have similarly been documentary in nature and have been viewed at film festivals worldwide. In addition to her success in film, Dunn has had her photographs published in two books; Bicycle Gangs of New York (2005), and Some Kinda Vocation (2007).
|
CLARE ROJAS
Multidisciplinary artist Clare Rojas is a painter, filmmaker, installation artist, creator of children’s books, and musician. Rojas appropriates folk imagery to explore issues such as loss, good versus bad, and beautiful versus ugly. She is concerned with contemporary perceptions of women and traditional gender roles. The artists subverts these ideas in her work through the creation of her own allegories and spaces. Rojas’ work is characterized by the presence of flattened (often female) figures set within sparse, flat landscapes. Though these figures are often portrayed alone, they emit a feeling of tranquility. Her more recent work has transitioned into pure geometric abstraction. Rojas is also a self-taught guitar and banjo musician, and has released three albums under the stage name Peggy Honeywell (her music is featured in the Beautiful Losers movie).
Web (Deitch profile)
|
INFLUENCES & AFFILIATED ARTISTS
MARK GONZALES "The Gonz"
Mark Gonzales is a pro-skateboarder and visual artist. He was a major influence on the artists featured in Beautiful Losers, especially Ed Templeton and Thomas Campbell who are also former pro-skateboarders. He is known for his carefree and physical approach to his skateboarding, he dodges through traffic and slides along Mack trucks, as well as his art. His approach to making art is described in the film as "stupidly genius".
|
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIATPainter and collage artist. His expressionistic creations packed with personal symbolism drawn from art history, literature, and street life earned widespread acclaim during a meteoric career preceding his death from drugs at twenty-seven. Yet, his deliberate primitivism and frequently clichéd, eclectic allusions drew criticism from those who found his work shallow, derivative, and incompetent. Basquiat was one of the earliest artists to incorporate street culture, punk rock, and graffiti into his artwork. His frenetic and colourful style was influential among the Beautiful Losers artists.
|