Recap: Fountain Art Fair Steps Up Its Game This Year

The Mighty Tanaka Gallery was in full effect with upwards of forty pieces on display in their large space, as well as three additional installation walls featuring UFO 907, Skewville and Dizmology. The gallery is run by Alex Emmart who chooses to represent artists as diverse in style as Flying Fortress, Cake, Lamour Supreme, infinity, Andrew H. Shirley, El Celso, and See One. He has a good eye for hanging such disparate styles on the same wall and a theory called Hybridism to tie it all together. Along with the west coast artist and 12oz regular, Art Poesia, who has theorized about a new millenium cultural summation called Graffuturism, the two have created terms that have risen out of their attempts to categorize and summarize the current subcultural merge of the aesthetic traditions of graffiti and street art. These hypotheses also could include the combination of the studious nature of the library with the visceral instinct of the streets and the convergence of styles that have developed within the gallery system versus on the streets.

A highlight of the Mighty Tanaka Gallery was UFO 907’s kinetic alien sculpture. The installation of the massive wood and metal vandal weighed in at 200 pounds. The piece was built by UFO and Ryan C. Doyle, a long-time art partner. They constructed it from discarded electronic wheelchair parts, which can all be seen through the cracks in the brain. The eyes move back and forth and the tentacles flail around as viewers move the joystick. The graff tools at the end of each tentacle spew black ink flowing down through a circulatory system that originates from a large can of Marsh printers ink that is lodged at the top of the alien’s brain with tubes running out of it. Just like any writer can attest, graffiti over time becomes a part of your mind and body just like any other organ that you were born with.

Mighty Tanaka has a new exhibition called Color and Motion opening this Saturday March 16th featuring the “shards” series by See One and the colorful meanderings of JMR.

Photos and text about Stephen Mallon’s photographic series “Last Stop Atlantic” at Front Room Gallery, about subway cars being submerged in the Atlantic Ocean to be used as barrier reefs on Page 3…