Meet the the All-Stars
New York City’s largest art collective brings its A-Game to 198 Allen Street this summer (August 6th - 12th) in an epic retrospective of long-time collaborators and studio members. Hand-selected from our rich eight-year history in the Lower East Side. Approaching the art world on their own terms, presenting artists embody the culture of Con Artist Collective. Join us for a public gallery reception Thursday, August 9th, 2018 7pm-11pm.
Now we would like to introduce each featured artist:
Kayo Albert
Kayo Albert was born in Hyogo, Japan. After graduating from college in Kyoto, she came to New York to study painting at Art Student League, New York Studio School, and School of Visual Arts. She is actively creating and exhibiting her work in New York. A member since 2014, Con Artist Collective has been her hub for collaboration, exchanging ideas, and inspiring with other fellow artists. Her work is abstract painting heavily combined with drawing on a surface called Mylar. Her use of paint rich in fluidity creates translucent layers, and gives depth and complexity. Mylar of which most of her paintings are done, also gives translucency, luminosity, and airlines. With strong interest in Carl Jung’s psychology, she takes references from nature, and memories perceived and stored in the unconscious, extracted in altered form. She expands her work in several projects: The Iceland Project explores the juxtaposition between abstract painting and landscape photography, which she took in Iceland. In The Pillar and Fault series, paintings are mounted on multi-dimensional planes of wooden board to cross the boundary of 2 dimensional surface.
Tomaso Albertini
Artist Tomaso Albertini was born in Milan, Italy (1984) where he attended the La Scuola del fumetto di Milano. He lives and works in New York City. His first professional work of large format paintings concentrated on a serious investigation of color. Here he broke free from the confines of illustration, the subject emphasized in his academic training, and began to create emotional projections that served as the foundation of his further development. Guided by instinct, he mixed color on flat surfaces using abstract forms that ultimately revealed figures. After this initial period, there was a big change. Albertini began to experiment with new materials. He wanted the work to be more physical - more direct. He introduced the use of burned, melted plastic into the paintings. He has described the process as a defacement of the figure in an effort to dig into the life of the human form. One senses the physical presence of form conveyed by a willful act of transference. Albertini than started to create three-dimensional art using cardboard. It allowed him to accomplish the figure as if it were a sculpture and paint on it as if it were a canvas. This technique introduced dynamics approaching sculpture. It is, in fact, a hybrid manifestation.
Atomik
Atomik is a 100% Miami artist. Atomik, trained in graphic design, is a big name in the Miami art scene. The graffiti legend, part of the infamous MSG crew, a group of local graffiti heroes, has been painting the city for quite some time. While growing up in the emerging Miami graffiti scene of the 80’s, Atomik witnessed for himself at a young age what would later become his profession. Famous for his iconic orange character which emerged as a response to the demolition of the Miami Orange Bowl, the artists also marks the walls of Miami with his sleek hand-styles, graffiti and lettering.
Jaouad “The Jah” Bentama
Jaouad Bentama is a French artist born and raised in Paris, France. As a kid from a non-artistic family, his passion was initiated by his neighbor who took him to his first museum trip, which exposed him to different art styles. Jaouad creates artwork that echoes deeply with the lightness, the happiness, and the innocence of childhood.
Ian Bertram
Ian is an artist working in multiple drawing and painting disciplines. His large scale works have been shown in Paris (Gallerie Glenat), Sri Lanka (Barefoot Gallery), and New York (David Lewis, Lazy Susan, Society of Illustrators). He has worked for Marvel, DC comics, Image comics, and Glenat BD. His current project is a creator-owned title called Little Bird, being published by Glenat Bd in France the winter of 2019.
Andrea Cook
Andrea Cook is an international artist dedicated to empowering women through her paintings on various mediums including the street. Her latest series, Pussy Power debuted at the Museum of Sex in 2015 in NYC. With over 1000 pieces, now in collector’s homes and on the streets in cities all over the world, this body of work continues to grow along with her role as an international artist and global activist. From a 20-year entrepreneurial career in technology and communications that began in Chicago, Cook evolved into a visual artist and has become purposeful and passionate about creating street art that empowers women that drives real social change. As a changeologist, Cook has a large body of work on change that has been showcased in hundreds of shows and venues throughout the country. Wallpaper Magazine "cherry-picked" Andrea Cook’s Pussy Power art as one of the “finest works” from the Art on Paper show during its Art Basel review in 2015.
Charlie Cunningham
Charlie Cunningham’s artwork invokes the contradictions within subjects both dubiously humorous and revolting. Utilizing campy motifs and materials, he searches for humorous optimism in mortality and satirizes the perverse nature of our destruction, both at the hands of time and our fellow man. His artworks span figurative sculpture, installation, drawing and painting. Each work can incorporate a wide variety of mediums including, ceramic, silicone, found objects, charcoal, urethane foam, resin, acrylic, and human hair. Charlie has recently exhibited at the Governor’s Island Art Fair, Burlington City Arts, and The Delaware Contemporary Art Museum. He is also the recipient of several awards and honors including a Teton Artlab Residency, Rasquache Artist Residency, and the Penn State University Creative Achievement Award.
Hektad
Hektad is a New York City graffiti pioneer. In 1982, at the age of 12, the Bronx native set out to compete with veteran bombers such as Mitch 77 and Chris 217. After an intense 12 year campaign on New York’s streets and transit system, Hektad took a well deserved break to focus on his family. In 2013, he returned with a vengeance. After jumping into what many consider a cluttered and undefined street art scene, Hektad clearly took the lead with his whimsical “Love Drunk” hearts and humorous anecdotes.
JCORP
JCORP is an American artist based in New York City. Known for her bright, starry-eyed characters, she explores pop culture and contemporary romance through street art, murals, and illustrative painting. She studied Visual and Critical Studies at the School of Visual Art and earned her BFA in 2014. Some of her clients include MTV, VICE, NBC Universal, Redbull TV, Creative Nail Design, Ricky's NYC, The Doughnut Project, Black Tree Brooklyn, and Little Skips; among other public art projects such as The 100 Gates Project, Centrefuge Public Art, Arts Org LIC, Welling Court Mural Project, Lower Manhattan Art Festival (L.I.S.A. Project), JMZ Walls, and many more.
Seunghwui Koo
Seunghwui Koo creates her works drawing inspiration from the daily happenings and intricate moments of her life in NYC. Her work is a commentary on the lives of New Yorkers as she has witnessed. She was born in South Korea, where she first had the idea of combining the pig’s head and human body. The significance of the pig’s head lies in the different symbolic meanings from the Eastern and Western cultures. Good fortune (Eastern) and greed (Western), two very different connotations of the pig, are themes that are a part of her works. She uses resin, acrylic, plaster, clay, and mixed media to create her works. She is one of the artists in the Chashama organization in NYC.
Joseph Meloy
Joseph Meloy is a muralist and mixed media artist who creates electrifying images that trigger the senses. His art is more of a subconscious realization of an idea or thing, than it is a fully realized or recognizable concept, yet there is enough there to convey a purposeful message of emotion, movement or mechanization. He has a distinctive style – each painting is a little different, but it’s always abstract with a bright color palette. He calls his work “post graffiti” art and coined the term “vandal expressionism” to best describe what he does.
Dean Millien
Millien is an NYC-based artist who creates sculptures out of aluminum foil. His first solo exhibition, “Curses, Foiled Again”, was debuted at Con Artist Collective. He has been commissioned by J.Crew for their “Crew Cuts” kids lines. His sculptures have also been featured in Macy’s window display.
John Raymond Mireles
John Raymond Mireles began his artistic career in the mountains as a rock climber, photographically documenting the lives and exploits of his fellow vertically inspired athletes. Though a climbing rope is no longer part of his equipment list, Mireles continues in his photographic adventures. His most recent series consists of portraits of Americans from all 50 states. Entitled the Neighbors Project, it has been publicly installed in San Diego, Phoenix, Anchorage, and in New York City’s Lower East Side - where it was listed by the New York Times and The Guardian newspapers as one of the top public exhibitions of 2018. Solo shows of his work include the Anchorage Museum in Anchorage, Alaska, Bread and Salt gallery in San Diego, and Circuitous Succession in Memphis, among others. Mireles is a recent transplant to New York City from his hometown of San Diego, California. His first solo gallery show in New York City will take place in September 2018 at the Storefront Gallery in the Lower East Side.
MOR
Mor is an artist and Brooklyn native. A daughter of storytellers and artists - her narrative originates from an inherent urge to express an inner landscape of dreams and symbols. Spirited forms of flora and fauna emerge from a delicate and meditative process of paper cutting. She utilizes both pencil and blade to create these multi-layer stencils and singular paper cuts.
Victor Joseph Ochoa
Victor Joseph Ochoa (b. 1988) is an artist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from The Cooper Union in 2010, Victor began to pursue a career in graphic design within the publishing industry. He has worked for companies such as HarperCollins, Scholastic, and Simon and Schuster designing books for children of all ages. He has had books on the New York Times best sellers list and has worked with companies such as Nickelodeon, Lionsgate, Guinness World Records, Rovio, DC Comics, and more. He is a member of the Con Artist Collective in the Lower East Side of New York City. Here he creates, mentors, learns, and grows with a family of artists from around the world. Outside of his graphic design career Victor continues to pursue all aspects of creation. In 2010 he started the independent comic publisher DRAWMORE INC., where he self-publishes comics. He has exhibited at numerous local comic conventions, such as New York Comic Con, MoCCA Festival, and King Kong. He also ran a successful Kickstarter campaign for the comic anthology NOBODIES Volume 2. He previously worked as the Lead Publishing Designer at Marvel Entertainment. He currently is an Art Director at Ellation (Crunchyroll & VRV).
Cody Oyama
Cooper Union alumni working with history, memory and the inability to touch either and the failures of both. Cody, along with Laura Tack (who now resides in Morocco) were two of the earliest artists to join the Collective and played a large role in the development of its culture.
RAD (Raddington Falls)
RAD is an artist and art educator in New York City. Originally from Los Angeles, Cuban-American RAD has exhibited and sold artwork online, galleries and alternative spaces. He has taught in museums, public and independent schools and community centers. His artwork embraces the person we were as a child. Sometimes, his artwork is a harsh mirror of our society. Most of the time, it lives somewhere in the middle. And perhaps his work may allow people to tap into their own sense of wonder and the power somewhere inside of them.
RX Skulls
Rx Skulls aka Arrex is a adhesively obsessed exterior decorator from Portland Oregon who’s street art revolves around a single skull photo taken in the Natural History Museum in London. The project began its evolution in 2010 after a series of medical hardships and a trip to Europe, which exposed Rx to the world of street art in person. Having already dabbled in screen printing, creating stickers and posters from scratch quickly became more of an addiction than a hobby. To this day, six years later, Rx travels the world sharing his skulls, tombstones, poison labels, and plethora of other morbid designs with the masses.
Audrey Ryan
Audrey Ryan is a figure painter with a dark sense of humor, hailing from Binghamton, New York. She holds a BFA in Drawing & Painting and a BS in Visual Arts Education from SUNY New Paltz. She is prolific, producing a constant stream of of observational gesture drawings, usually in ink or charcoal as well as many large-scale oil paintings. Her work is regularly published by Endless Editions, and is distributed/exhibited internationally. She is informed by punk culture, and histories of disorder, addiction and recovery. While also making drawings, poems, prints, zines, videos, installations and tattoos, she aims to communicate the struggle to survive our human selves.
Rachael Senchoway
Rachael Senchoway wishes to inhabit a space where her restless energy can channel itself into something that lives outside of her body. She takes in her environment and returns it to the world as characters that are ultimately stand-ins for herself, and people she knows in her dreams. She is able to exert control over this dimension and integrate the creatures into a system that allows them to escape, become heros, animals, lovers, and ghosts whom exist in an ongoing myth. Creating these places helps her to see where she’s been, and where she’s going. Each painting is treated as an individual meditation within a body of work. These ideas allow her to rediscover the complexities of her own human experience.
Katie Shima
Katie Shima (BA Columbia University, MArch Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation) is an artist and architect based in Brooklyn. Katie has had exhibitions at BRIC, the Knockdown Center, Bridge Gallery, Mighty Tanaka Gallery, Devotion Gallery, Trestle Gallery, and others in New York City as well as the GWVA Museum in Springfield, MA, and D.A.K. in Aarhus, Denmark. Residencies include Trestle Art Space, Con Artist Collective, Clocktower Gallery, and Det Jyske Kunstakademie. Katie is also a founding member of the electronic noise art group Loud Objects and has taught as an instructor at Columbia University.
Brandon Sines
Frank Ape is a Sasquatch who lives in New York City amongst the humans and is the creation of artist Brandon Sines. Frank can be seen all over the city on any given day and has been spotted on streets and in homes around the world. He embodies positivity and equality, and cares about all living things. Frank believes in "creating your own universe" and inspiring people and animals every day. Shortly after moving to New York City in 2010, Sines combined his use of mythological creatures, pop icons, and made up characters into a new character called Frank. Frank is an “ape” that often takes the form of a cartoon, but is no doubt a reference to Sines himself. Frank explores human conditions without human restrictions.
The Sucklord
The Sucklord is a New York City Pop Artist and Television Personality known for his subversive Action Figure mashups and Reality TV Persona. Operating under the Brand SUCKADELIC, The Sucklord’s Line of self-manufactured Bootleg Toys steal shamelessly from STAR WARS, Vintage Advertising and All manner of Pop Culture Trash. Packaged in layers of ironic self-Mockery, His shoddy looking wares have inspired an entire secondary Art movement, with dozens of entrepreneurial Toy Bootleggers creating their own versions of highly referential, low-Rent interpretations of their favorite figures. Recently The Sucklord has increased the scale of his work, putting oversized Blister-carded figures in Tokyo Art Galleries, the homes of the famously wealthy, and the Walls of downtown New York City.
Laura Tack
Born on 9 June in Belgium, Laura Tack works through images and materials in an attempt to connect with the vastness of time, using processes that emphasize the connection between creation and destruction. Laura, as a painter, depicts both the pains and joys of seeking out and growing closer to our roots. She is currently living and working in Marrakech, Morocco.
Sarah Wang
Sarah is interested in people and the communities they represent. In her photography and films, she collaborates with her subjects to tell their stories. She is exploring new ways and mediums through which to tell these stories, working in collaboration with professionals in various creative fields along the way. A photographer, film-maker, and curator born in Harbin, China, Sarah grew up in the Bay Area from the age of six. She earned her BA in Art Education from San Francisco State University with an emphasis in drawing and painting as well as a CA Teaching Credential in K-12 Art Education. Sarah worked as an artist teacher with the Joan Mitchell Foundation during her first three years in New York. She then, along with fellow artist, Shaina Yang opened an alternative art space in the Lower East Side, called City Bird Gallery. They offered an experimental space for emerging & professional artists as well as student and community organizations to exhibit their work. Shaina and Sarah have since joined forces with a collective of women and gender non-binary artists and curators to create Disclaimer Gallery, an experimental installation space catered to showing queer, women of color and other marginalized groups.
Wizard Skull
Wizard Skull is an artist living and working in Brooklyn NY. Early on he picked up skateboarding, and he immersed himself within the subculture. Designing T-shirts, skateboard graphics, and skateboarding in local shop videos, he eventually went on to design over 200+ board graphics for skateboard companies from Norway, Russia, England, and all over the US and rest of the world. His art as well as himself skateboarding appeared in numerous skateboard magazines including Thrasher. Adopting the moniker of Wizard Skull and abandoning freelance design work, he began wheat pasting his art all around New York. One of his most often wheat pastes was "Sexy Ronald", a buff version of Ronald McDonald wearing only underwear with fries popping out of them. People began photographing and sharing images of it on social media which led to the image going viral several times, being bootlegged and sold on T-shirts in Thailand. This also led to his art being exposed to a larger audience.
Shaina Yang
Shaina Lee-Shuan Yang, often known as Aniahs Gnay or Moon Mansion, is a multidisciplinary visual artist and arts organizer based in NYC. Their work explores the relationships of the vessel body and its carried symbols, connectivity, and the space between it all. They are influenced by the superstitious nature of their Taiwanese family and life as first-generation queer American.
Be there for our biggest show to date!