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18 Oct: Regan Ha-Ha Tamanui "Personal Heroes" (NZ)

OREXART
Entry at Upper Khartoum Place, Kitchener Street
Deliveries to 1st Floor 32 Lorne Street
Auckland, New Zealand
Tel. 649 379 0588
Open Tue - Fri 10 - 5 l Sat 11 - 3

http://www.orexgallery.co.nz/artist_pages/Tamanui_PersonalHeroes.htm

In his most recent solo exhibition, Tamanui presents Personal Heroes, a retrospective portrait series of New Zealand's beloved All Blacks players to coincide with the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

Invoking 19th Century colonial portraits of the 'noble savage', Tamanui's players of Maori, Pacific Islander and Pakeha descent are at once signifier of historical colonialist hegemony, and critique of contemporary corporate globalisation.

Personal Heroes reminisces on rugby union's recent history, before the professional era ushered in. In this series, Tamanui explores themes of 'the working class man' and the 'team vs individual'. These themes serve as an allegory for contemporary culture and the 21st Century decline of community.

10 Nov: Blek Book Event at SFMOMA (SF, CA, USA)

(I wrote an essay for this book. Haven't seen it yet, but now is your chance buy a copy and meet one of the stencil OGs - Russell)

Blek le Rat, the 30 Year Anniversary Retrospective will be available at the San Francisco MoMA on November 10, 2011, from 6:30 to 8:30.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street (between Mission and Howard) in the Schwab Room
San Francisco, California

Join us and meet iconic Parisian stencil graffiti artist Blek le Rat as he signs copies of his new book!

"Blek le Rat's stencils distill the essence of the human struggle into poetically concise images. Blek shows clarity in his work, he makes every stylized mark count, yielding art that is at once personal and universal, economical in gesture, and bountiful in statement."

—Shepard Fairey

By RSVPing to this event you are reserving your $70.00 copy of the Blek le Rat 30 Year Anniversary Retrospective. Books can be picked up, signed and dedicated by the artist at the MoMA during the event.

RSVP via FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=230788106977769&notif_t=event_in…

We look forward to seeing you there!

100,000-Year-Old Paint Shop Discovered

In African Cave, Signs of an Ancient Paint Factory
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Original Article appears HERE

Digging deeper in a South African cave that had already yielded surprises from the Middle Stone Age, archaeologists have uncovered a 100,000-year-old workshop holding the tools and ingredients with which early modern humans apparently mixed some of the first known paint.

These cave artisans had stones for pounding and grinding colorful dirt enriched with a kind of iron oxide to a powder, known as ocher. This was blended with the binding fat of mammal-bone marrow and a dash of charcoal. Traces of ocher were left on the tools, and samples of the reddish compound were collected in large abalone shells, where the paint was liquefied, stirred and scooped out with a bone spatula.

In the workshop remains, archaeologists said they were seeing the earliest example yet of how emergent Homo sapiens processed ocher, one of the species’ first pigments in wide use, its red color apparently rich in symbolic significance. The early humans may have applied the concoction to their skin for protection or simply decoration, experts suggested. Perhaps it was their way of making social and artistic statements on their bodies or their artifacts.

The Tour Funds the Murals (Video)

I have my local public art tour set up through a DIY tour site (set up a tour in your city) called Vayable.com. They just moved offices a block away from CELLspace and the murals that I try to maintain and curate. Hard to maintain and curate with no budget, but I make it happen via profits form the tour and an amazing group of volunteer artists, builders, and neighbors.

I walked June from Vayable through CELLspace last week and gave her a tour. She made a short video of the visit.