#weldon arts

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Complex Magazine Features NohJColey and Weldon Arts

For those new to street art, you may not be familiar with the work of NohJColey. The artist creates sculptural works as well as wheatpastes throughout New York, often dealing with themes of racism as well as portraits of people he knows. He last held a solo exhibition at Weldon Arts; the space was transformed with pieces set under bottles, fences adhered to walls, and patterned stencils.

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Bushwick Street Art - Winter '13/'14

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Nether at Weldon Arts 

My lost but then found favorite video from my Vine tour of Beat Night in Bushwick! 

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Weldon Arts will be participating in Beat Nite this Friday, February 15th in conjunction with Norte Maar and nine other Bushwick galleries. All participating galleries will be open from 6pm to 10pm followed by an afterparty at Bizarre, located at 12 Jefferson Street.

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Weldon Arts Interviews NETHER about his work and solo show: Crumbling Cities, which opens this Thursday, January 24th.

1. What first inspired you to start doing street art?

It all started by collecting stickers back in the day and constantly transforming the deck of my skateboard with stickers and stencils.  Once the board (which I still have) had seen enough resurfacing I started putting my stuff elsewhere.   As I continued doing art, having a presence on the street was always a part of it. When I started really wheatpasting hard a few years ago it was due to the realization that the work I was doing had a lot to do with [location] so installing my work around Baltimore seemed most appropriate.  As soon as I started pasting everything changed.

2. Is there a difference to you between painting on the street and creating works for a gallery setting?

Yeah, there is a big difference as there is also a difference between working legally and illegally outdoors.  Painting legally and gallery are similar in [the] sense that the time you have to work allows for a lot more experimentation and artistic development. At the same time, the legal doesn’t give you that rush at the moment when you grab your shit and are walking away from a spot that you just hit.  In the end both are pretty essential to most artists and personally I find my gallery work pushing my street work and vice versa. 3. Nether originally began as a social message in Baltimore. Since your origination, you have painted in cities around the world, including New York and Paris. Does your work change outside of its original context? At the beginning my pieces were only being put up in Baltimore, but I have always loved to travel and one of the biggest kicks I get out of street art is seeing pieces from artists who have traveled to put up their work in different cities.  Also putting up work is a great lense [with] which to explore cities. Seeing work from artists who aren’t local to Baltimore in Baltimore is something that is also really exciting and helps hype up Baltimore’s street art scene.   When I travel and put up work I find [the] most value [by] staying true to what I know best. I think it is really interesting when people in, say, Shanghai, are able to see something that is usually only found in a completely different place on the globe.  These types of connections between people in different places all over the world are truly beautiful.   4. What do you see as the role of the artist in society? Freddy Sam [said it in] the most beautiful way I have heard: “removing the greyness from the soul of the city is the job of musicians, artists, and poets.”  I feel that the most positive effect that public art has is its ability to solidify the connections people have to their surroundings. The more that this happens the better off our societies will be. 5. How do you want to affect viewers of Crumbling Cities? One of the problems that I have had doing street art gallery show’s is how pristine as well as conformed the whole experience can be. I thought it would be appropriate to bring the types of canvases I paste on in the streets into the gallery context.  Since the biggest passion in my artwork is addressing Baltimore’s mass vacancy problem, I thought I’d bring parts of the actual under-maintained vacants into the gallery context.  Just about all of the pieces in the show are actual large sized street piece originals on plywood or created from scraps that I have gathered from vacant properties that are literally in the process of falling down.

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Graffiti Artist RISK Brightens Up the Streets with the Skid Row Mural Project

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Dark Corners, Savage Secrets - Weldon Arts Interviews Robyn Hasty AKA Imminent Disaster 

Your work has been seen on the streets now for about six years. You started off with "culture jamming" on public displays. How has your work evolved?

My street work started with culture jamming and moved on to large scale wood cut and paper cut wheatpastes. When I was culture jamming, there was always something about power and subverting it going on internally, propelling me to that outlet. There was something subversive still in the wheatpasting, but I began to be more driven by making beautiful images an placing them well on the street. Besides just the imagery, I wanted to call attention to the beauty I found in certain nooks of the city, in a crumbling facade or a box car in the middle of a vacant lot, and interject something into those spaces that called attention to the surrounding architecture as much as they called attention to the wheatpastes themselves.

Since then my work has become more studio oriented, although I am still driven by some underlying interest in intensity, subversion and shaking up people's expectations. With this installation, I feel like a mischief maker that wants to trick people into viewing intense content by making it irresistibly beautiful.

In both your street art and fine art, strong female characters frequently appear. There is a clear erotic stance for "Dark Corners, Savage Secrets." How much and in what way does sexuality inform your work?

I'm the kind of person that sees desire in everything. I believe it's a part of everything we make, from dinner to music to love. I think the act of making art enters into a dialogue with the material where the artist and the object are mutually affecting each other's transformation. The material has a set of given properties that the artist has to understand deeply in order to manipulate, and while engaging in this dialogue with the material, the act of working it transforms the artist as well. I think this sensitivity and openness to a material, and allowing it to affect you as you affect it is definitely analogous to what I want my sexual relationships to be.

What is "Dark Corners, Savage Secrets"? How do you want viewers to be affected?

"Dark Corners, Savage Secrets" is a show about pushing limits, and transcendence.  It's about something very powerful and fundamental that often happens invisibly within us, and trying to find out if it's possible to make it visible to others, and if that's even appropriate. I'm definitely dancing with a lot of ideas of social expectations, from what is the defining line between art and pornography, to what it means for a woman to deal with her own sexuality so explicitly. I hesitate to call this work feminist, although in some ways it could be called that. I feel like my photographs were taken from a position of power, with utter confidence-- they are not images taken from the position of being victimized, especially not by maleness. The men I have photographed are vulnerable, there is clearly intimacy and trust there, which are the moments I am trying to capture. Perhaps this show is about seeing past the surface. And that's the subversive, mischief-making game I'm playing with you, if you are game.