THE RIDE OUT
The Ride Out Project is a Mural and Mini Documentary project that explores and celebrates ride culture. The project focuses on motorbikes/ATVs, horseback riding, and bicycle riding as a community form and legacy in Philadelphia, particularly for the Philadelphia Black and Brown communities. This project elevates and honors these forms of community gathering and their multigenerational intersectionality.
Join us Saturday, June 29th for a screening and neighborhood party to celebrate the completion of this project. 1719 68th Ave Philadelphia PA 19126.
ILE OMI
Ile Omi: House of Water is a projection-mapped installation. It is inspired by intersectional African Diasporic culture, West African culture, and chronophysics, the field of physics that specifically deals with the concept of time and time travel. It showcases a thriving underwater community throughout various times. The imagined people are the descendants of the African souls lost during transatlantic slave voyages. The installation transports visitors to a futuristic world where these descendants have adapted to an underwater lifestyle and formed a thriving, communal society.
The projection mapping technology creates an immersive underwater environment filled with vibrant colors, textures, and sounds. The work contains a blend of iconography and images inspired by various traditional West African religions and Yoruba customs and imaginings of what a future derived from this experience would look, sound, and feel like. Visitors are invited to explore this underwater world and to witness the community’s rich cultural traditions, innovative technologies, and harmonious relationships with the surrounding marine ecosystem.
The project uses a combination of archival photography and AI-generated photographs, combined with a custom score to create an alternate reality where visitors can explore alternative histories and futures that were previously deemed impossible.
By presenting this alternate reality, the installation invites visitors to re-imagine the potential of humanity and to question the limitations imposed by history and circumstance.
Ile Omi is part of the Diaphanous series – An immersive collection of art, telling our stories and guiding guests through a whimsical, imaginative collection of experiences and material objects. This collection blends art, technology, and history to re-imagine and re-tell stories of the African Diaspora that have been excluded or marginalized due to racial and gender biases. Each offering embodies a theme of something or someone that could only exist now but re-framed as if it did exist in a prior time, space, or dimension.
additional support provided by Tough Dumplin, Garey Kennebrew and Shea Zephir
Thank you to our exhibition sponsors: Blink Cincinnati and Epson America
Thank you to our PAR-Projects and the season sponsors: ArtsWave, Ohio Arts Council, and Northside Bank & Trust Company.
GOING PLACES + DIY PRINTING
DIY PRINTING + MZ.ICAR Going Places
An Exhibition and Printing Play Date with DIY Printing Studio and The Mz. Icar Collective.
Where:
DIY Printing, 2511 Essex Place Studio #188 Cincinnati, OH 45206
When: on display til June 19th, 2024
These limited edition color screen prints are available here.
This is part of our new Diaphanous Series
The collective has been thematically working on envisioning best-case scenarios, visual pieces, and symbols that imagine the paths to get to those ideal scenarios. These collage pieces feature images from our archives. AI-generated images and illustrated pieces. Through this series of work, we are playing with new technologies, studying traditional West African spirituality along with diasporic ancestry, and using this to frame future paths.
We are thinking about how do we incorporate history, tradition, and technology as tools that help tell stories that inspire. Sometimes we just need to see ourselves in glorious alternative ways.
This collection of work envisions progress, movement, internal or external but mostly focuses on imagining how we get to our ideal scenarios.
KEEP GOING
KEEP GOING
‘Keep Going’
Our latest antics @arteloksq
“Keep Going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.”
-Harriet Tubman.
This location specific piece is located in an incredible motel project called @arteloksq located in Kennett Square.
201 Birch St, Kennett Square, PA 19348In the 19th century, the borough played an instrumental role in the Underground Railroad and we decided to uplift this story and pay homage to Harriet Tubman…and encourage everyone to keep going!
Huge thanks to @squarerootscollective
CLEARLY FOR WARBY PARKER
CLEARLY
We are so excited to announce our recent work with Warby Parker.
This piece entitled ‘Clearly’ was created for the new Marietta Georgia location.
You can check it out in person at the brand new store location located at 3625 Dallas Hwy #615, Marietta, GA 30064
SHE IS HERE
SHE IS HERE for BED STUY WALLS
We decided to play a little bit on this one. This piece is entitled “She is here: A Declaration for Bed Study” we had a ton of fun painting our third outdoor mural in Brooklyn. This mural features our lines triangles and a few of the characters we’ve been developing through our soft space series.
A declaration for Bed Stuy
We had the honor of creating this piece last weekend for @bedstuywalls it was such a pleasure. Huge thanks to @miki__mu and @artface7 for organizing such an incredible event and pulling together so much talent!
Right across the street from 626 Lexington Ave. Brooklyn, NY 12233
TRANSITIONS
TRANSITIONS
Over the summer we were invited by Sprocket Murals to create a mural in York, Pennsylvania. We did a little bit of research and realized the area is in quite a bit of transition. We wanted to channel this into this new piece and title transitions and with it, we decided to incorporate our signature triangles representing balance along with portions of various faces blending one into the other.
QUANTUM LEAP
QUANTUM LEAP
“Quantum Leap” is a bold and dynamic 10x22ft mural that embraces a future-leaning perspective while paying tribute to the vibrant individuals who energize the heart of Philadelphia. Through a vivid interplay of colors, we celebrate the city’s resilience and authenticity. This artwork weaves a narrative of travel, migration, and constant movement, deeply embedded in the city’s ethos. By juxtaposing the present city skyline with visionary architectural elements, the piece beckons viewers to envision a boundless and progressive urban landscape. “Quantum Leap” encapsulates the essence of Philadelphia’s spirit, portraying the convergence of past, present, and future that fuels its perpetual transformation.
This interior mural was commissioned for 1735 Market Street Philadelphia PA
Thank you @silversteinproperties for the commission.
LET'S PLAY
LET'S PLAY
Let’s Play is a celebration of this gathering space at the Shipyard in Green Bay. It features the branding colors and font in a geometric arrangement, as well as some of the endangered species in the area, including the gray wolf and whooping crane, and white-tailed deer. The patterns in the design are inspired by the Menominee people and serve as an acknowledgment of the land in which the space exists.
OTHERWORLD
SOMETHING YOU CAN FEEL
When Otherworld approached us to create an installation that took up a whole room and considered all sensory nodes. We were over the moon.
A lot of the experiential places are very digital and we decided we wanted to take an extremely analog approach to this project. We wanted to be slow, deliberate, and purposeful. We considered the process and the experience of making the piece as well as the experience of the. We wanted something that really encouraged viewers to engage in something tactile. So we set out to do a very ambitious tufted project. We proposed a piece called ‘something you can feel’. It’s comprised of multiple panels of hand-tufted drips, pom, poms, hair door, knockers and plastic orbs with the scraps for my pom poms. It even includes upcycled crocheted fabrics. We’ve been on a big world-building kick and often spend a lot of time imagining various futures this piece and bodies it through its mural, which is black light responsible along with the tufted panels. We wanted to concentrate on slow transitions. The lighting in the room transitions from bright light to black light. The music is considered in this piece and every corner of the space offers a different experience as each corner has a soundtrack that is more dominant depending on where you stand in the room.
It seems as though it’s been increasingly challenging to find grounding as a society as a people, and we decided we wanted to create a piece that encourages that form of grounding. We definitely utilize technology, but we focused on very traditional methods and wanted to encourage a cozy space with a future-leaning ethos our future includes the babies but it also includes the elders and this is depicted in the mural featured on the piece.
Much gratitude to Otherworld both the Columbus @enter.otherworld and Philadelphia @otherworld.philly teams for the opportunity huge thank you to the @fkbstudiofor the assistance and support on the project. And massive gratitude to our adjacent member, Gina Giles of @artfully.gigi Huge thanks to all of our friends and family that came through Drank tea and pom pommed with us throughout the winter. We hope to do it again soon.
