Krista Charles draws Google Street Views inside matchbooks with graphite and everybody knows it.

SWOON, godmother of the Swimming Cities, stewarded by our pal Jeffrey Deitch. SWOON is hard at work creating artists’ hives in neglected metropoli like Pittsburgh, Detroit and New Orleans — stay tuned for more from the artist, and Jeffrey, here.

Flashcards and studio shots from Erin Garcia’s mural at Ace Palm Springs with JUNK Magazine.

Photos by Chris Stewart and Aaron Farley.

HOW DO YOU MEAN? CULTURE IN TRANSLATION
PICA SYMPOSIUM, JUNE 7 - 9, PORTLAND, ORE.

We experience the world through continual acts of translation. To be sure, we often carry meaning between languages, but that process isn’t limited to the spoken dialects of different cultures. We turn thoughts into actions, and experiences into conversation. Translation is difference made visible. Translation is experimental. Translation is generous.

Artistic practice is a necessary process of translation, from intangible ideas to concrete forms and decisive gestures, but also between disciplines and bodies, between the artists and their audiences. What possibilities exist in the spaces between kinesthetic and verbal language, visual art and dance, traditional and contemporary expression, local and global styles?

The PICA Symposium is an interdisciplinary weekend of art, performance, and conversations, investigating the complexity of constructing and communicating culture in contemporary art. It’s an update of a classical model for our hyphenated culture, weighing experience and activity equally with lectures and panels. It is driven by your involvement, it’s propelled by your movement.

See featured events, more information and a schedule here.

Meet the people who wash your dishes.

The Dishwasher Project is an intimate portrayal and tribute to the men and women behind Portland’s celebrated culinary scene. The paintings seek to honor the individual, their lives in the back of the house, and humanize the grueling work of keeping the restaurant service moving. Our hope for this project is to plant a question in the minds of patrons of these restaurants with rock-star-status chefs who, truly, are only as good as their team. We took the most unsavory of these positions, the individuals who see the aftermath of a meal and live in the steam, soap and waste of an otherwise glorious experience. We hope to give a face and history to the hands that hold our dishes. We are humbled to have their stories to share, and hope that the next time you spend a Sunday afternoon indulging in a five-star brunch, you’ll consider the people for which there is no James Beard Award, but should garner your esteem.

Natalie Sept began this project in 2010 during her time at Papa Haydn restaurant where she was a pastry tech, and began to take notice of the dishwashers who often times where coming from another job and leaving to the next after their time washing dishes. Israel Bayer joined Natalie in 2012 and began taking photographs for the project. You can view it tonight for a one-night-only show in The Cleaners at Ace Hotel Portland.

Pictured here in order are Efrain, Katrine, Maestro and George.

INTERVIEW : SHEPARD FAIREY 

Shepard Fairey is an old friend, and one of the first artists to plaster the walls at Ace Hotel Seattle with their work. You know his name, your grandmother knows his name (probably), but we wanted to catch up with the dude, not the legend. Above you’ll find a spread from Gingko Press’s OBEY: Supply & Demand depicting Shepard wheatpasting a mural in Downtown LA with the United Artists Theater — our new Los Angeles coat hook — in the background. Below you’ll find a few choice words from the artist himself, sans posse.

How are you, Shepard?

Good, just staying busy making crap — adding to the abundance of visual pollution we all struggle with daily.

Likewise. You’ve said that Obey stickers have always been an invitation to question and look for meaning, but aren’t intended to convey an implicit message. The Walrus’ Nick Mount wrote that, “Obey Giant is clever child of Duchamp, ironic conceptual art.” What relationship do you see between disruptive, ironic and humorous street art, and the Dadas who rejected prescribed narratives and embraced irrationality and trickterism to disrupt the dominance of state propaganda? Did you get all that?

Yeah, yeah I did. The project started off with a really silly sticker of Andre the Giant. That was something where I made an inside joke with some skateboard friends. What fascinated me and made it turn into a bigger project was the way that it became like a Rorschach test — in the Dada sense of throwing something out there that seemed like it had any number of interpretations. None of it was explicit. Who’s the Posse? Andre the Giant’s dead, who cares? It sort of invited people project onto it. In that sense the project’s always had a Dada side to it.

I’ve also connected it to various other things — Heidegger’s Theory of Phenomenology, which is the idea that people become so numb to their surroundings that they need novel encounters to reawaken a sense of wonder. It’s also like Situationism — the idea that people are dulled by routine. They need a bizarre spectacle to snap them out of their trance. I always liked those ideas.

The idea of a command to ‘obey’ but with nothing specific that they’re told to obey really seemed to irritate a lot of people. Some people understood that it was ironic. It really meant to question in an overt way how you’ve been asked to obey in a covert way or in an insidious way. All of that, the open-endedness, I thought would maybe get in there and fester a little bit.

Shepard’s 2010 installation on temporary plywood scaffolding in front of Ace Hotel New York.

Read More

LOS ANGELES

LA-based artist and musician and charming darling of a human being Erin Garcia worked out some major feelings of joy and wonder on the Commune wall at Ace Hotel & Swim Club in Palm Springs, with a graphic geometrical mural right in time for Desert Gold this spring. You can hang it en miniature on your own wall now — we have a limited edition of prints signed by the artist on our shop.

Stay tuned for an interview with Erin Garcia by Lucy Rose of JUNK Magazine — in rooms at Ace Palm Springs — conducted over Gchat, with a special video by JUNK of Erin’s creative process for the mural.

Harry Smith and Rosebud Feliu Pettet, whom he considered his “spiritual wife,” circa 1979 during a Stimulators show in the Green Room at Max’s Kansas City. Photographer unknown. See Rosebud and other loved ones of Harry Smith read, tell stories and recollect about Harry tonight at Ace Hotel New York, celebrating Harry’s 90th birthday.

Harry Smith’s painting of Manteca by Dizzy Gillespie.

Though rightfully well-known as an archivist of American music traditions, Harry Smith the conservator never staked out a static position on the musical spectrum. He started his polymath’s journey into the universal languages inherent in music as a young, conspicuously crewcut kid recording the songs of a Lummi ceremony. 

Harry Smith photographed by American Magazine in 1943, recording songs on a Lummi reservation.

At the dawn of bebop, he was at Jimbo’s Bop City in San Francisco, painting Dizzy Gillespie’s Manteca stroke-for-note and creating experimental films to sync with the flight patterns of Charlie Parker’s saxophone. In the 50s he recorded a fifteen LP set of liturgical songs by Orthodox Rabbi Nuftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia. In ‘65, he produced The Fugs First Album, one of the earliest documents of garage rock. By the 80s you could catch him at punk shows around the East Village. 

His was a life lived steadfastly out of place, always avoiding the paths worn by less wanderous feet. He paid a price — it was the life of a hermit, a true starving artist and visionary from another time. Yet he was recognized during his lifetime — for the influence of his Anthology of American Folk Music on 60s culture and of his experimental films, which you can still see shades of today in, say, the stage show of Flying Lotus. 

Harry Smith with Harley Flanagan, later of the Cro-Mags.

It’s hard to imagine his grapples with esoterica, his obsession with the inscrutable systems underlying things, if you aren’t wired the way he was, and probably not many of us are. His life itself and the cultures that shine through in his work though stand as an exemplar of polyculture in action. He was never prone to mass monoculture from above or provincialism from below. The cosmogony he left behind is like some vast temple where you may never unlock the mysteries of the rites but the door is open to all. We’re celebrating his too-brief stay on this planet next Wednesday at Ace Hotel New York — on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday — with music, reading and reflections by some people who knew him and some of the many more changed by his work.

Typewriter drawing by Harry Smith.