Later, I came up with the idea to create a wall for the museum as well and wanted to connect the pieces together. I felt strongly that my public piece should be about the environment since Virginia Beach is so connected to the ocean. When I came to Virginia Beach over two years ago I searched different locations for my public projects. This grand desire served as inspiration for this piece. And there are always all bad news… once I even saw a front page with headlines conjecturing about which celebrities were going to die next. I travel a lot and I always stop by the bookstore in the airport and take a look at the front pages of different magazines and newspapers. Negativity creates negativity so I hope positivity will create positivity. Olek: Every paper, TV and radio station will publish only positive news. We spoke with Olek about the philosophy behind this new work and how it arrived here for “Turn the Page.”īrooklyn Street Art: How did you decide to create a work like this featuring what you call only good news? In fact, Olek is suggesting that each of us holds a responsibility to sway the headlines with our own actions. Hopefully they won’t be outraged by Olek’s new tapestry inspired work which implies that humans are somehow responsible for global warming and pollution, instead of islands of plastic consumer packaging growing organically in our oceans because God wants it that way. Running through the end of the year before traveling to the Akron Art Museum in Ohio and the Sacramento Art Museum, the show features 51 artists that span a number of the newer genres of surrealism, dark pop, design and influences from street culture of course with names that have grown appreciably in the last decade including Camille Rose, James Jean, Tara McPherson, Shepard Fairey, Kehinde Wiley and Mark Riley, whose surreal fantasy works here have somehow irked the irony-challenged protectors of goodness some folk in the community. (photo © Rebecca Davidson)Īt the opening Saturday, the visitors were treated to a wide variety of contemporary artworks that satisfied and challenged with unusual imagery which plays as much on the last fifty years of pop culture as it does with modern perceptions of traditional art-making. The exhibition just opened over the weekend celebrates the 10th Anniversary of the San Francisco based Hi-Fructose, a glossy quarterly art magazine that has set a high-quality standard for Low Brow and its various cousins that are bending conceptions and challenging categories of pop, surrealism, hyper-reality and fantasy. For a variety of reasons, this amount of this sort of news wouldn’t be “fit to print”, as the times likes to refer to its content.īut Olek says that she is dreaming and she was inspired by the “Turn the Page” theme of this show, which encouraged her to look forward as she created this crocheted piece in Poland and New York of 576,000 loops. With a lead story about the rise in “underwater parks’ and headlines trumpeting a steep rise in vegetarianism and a global ban on plastic bags, you would be hard-pressed to imagine an above-the-fold selection like this to be featured in the Times ever – especially only four years from now, as indicated by the 2020 date in the masthead. Olek’s new work ready to be unbundled and completed in situ. Perhaps there is already, she posits, but we’re not focusing on it. In effect, Olek is speaking to the power of the media to shape our perception of the world as much as she is dreaming that there would be enough good news to fill it. “Can you imagine a day that only had good news? I dream that someday there will be at least one day a year with only good news to share,” she told us during an interview and as idealistic as that sounds, you can imagine the effect of that on readers when you experience the scale of this work. It’s good news especially for Street/crochet/fine artist Olek at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and her brand new recreation of a shockingly large crocheted front page of The New York Times that she draped on an exterior facade of the museum last week. It’s a “good news” day! A perfect sunny spring day to flip through the newspaper while sitting at the windowsill and enjoy the gentle breezes that will lead us to summer.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |