RANDOM
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
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.
MZ & DORITOS
MZ & DORITOS
We are in full swing of mural season and have barely had a moment in the studio. All the wonderful projects are blooming including this one. In route to another project we had to pop by our studio to pick up this beautiful press release package of our partnership with Doritos. We couldn’t be more thrilled to help celebrate this year’s change-makers and elevate all of the cool work they’re doing and celebrate it with this beautiful packaging. The artwork’s theme is all about Thriving!
This limited edition bag is available nationwide at Walmart. While we were on the road, we noticed it hadn’t hit stores in Green Bay or Milwaukee, but we’re getting messages from across the nation of folks picking up this bag in local stores. Grab a few if you can.
Here’s a link to the project!
HEAVY DISTORTION
HEAVY DISTORTION
We were the proud recipients of the black music city Grant and for this project we decided to do an augmented reality piece celebrating sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Heavy Distortion is an augmented reality project celebrating the influence of Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She is most known for a technique called heavy distortion. This piece aims to immerse the experiencer in heavy distortion.
Huge thanks to
#BlackMusicCityGrant @wxpnfm @recphilly
#sisterrosettatharpe
AR USER EXPERIENCE INSTRUCTIONS
Heavy Distortion V1
The first one is image responsive. Meaning that if you download the @Artivive app on a mobile device and show it the image marker and it will activate the Augmented reality.
Heavy Distortion V2
This one is activated by a link or QR code.
MZ BK XBOX
MZ BK XBOX
Over the winter we were minding our business planting seeds and tending to our garden. This of our first spring projects.
We had the lovely opportunity to collaborate with @xbox and their celebration of the Brooklyn Nets’ 10 years in Brooklyn @seedbrklyn.
Time is so interesting. I feel like it was just yesterday when all of BK was up in arms about building that Barclay center, but at the same time had excitement about a basketball team returning to the borough. We’ve been so humbled to experience such a grand transformation.
We definitely have very, very bittersweet emotions around the Brooklyn that exists now and past Brooklyn but in the stew of life, I guess it’s all one big pot of gumbo. And the one thing that is a constant is change. We’ve changed. It’s changed. You’ve changed. No one is the same as who they were before.
For this project, we created a mural, limited edition jackets and a very limited edition run of custom prints for Xbox. It was a real pleasure to be in community and celebrate. They even got us to dust off our thread skills and we had a live embroidery set up doing patches. It was a lot of fun.
Some of you may remember that under a different iteration, we used to be on the streets of New York City almost every weekend vending, selling bizarre handmade upcycled goods and artwork before there was language and context behind what we were doing. This event took us back to the early/mid 2000s and had us thinking about our journey.
We channeled that journey into this work and the illustration created for the mural and we’re beyond thrilled to be able to mirror that back to BK.
Much gratitude to @palettegrp for including us in this celebration
WHEN IN GERMANY
WHEN IN GERMANY
We were invited to Flöha, Saxony, Germany along with a bunch of other incredible artists to transform this closed paper factory into a playground of creativity for this year’s @ibug.art festival
The process:
When we asked about assigned spaces we were told by the organizers to let the wall speak to us. I’m not going to lie. It’s really stressful to create work on the spot. It’s a great exercise but it’s rough. Our installation piece ‘PRODUCTIVE HUMAN BEING’ was created on the spot and in response to what we learned about the paper, factory and materials that were found in the building.
The context:
There is a lot of intersectionality btwn the fall of industrialism in US cities and the story of this paper factory. Folks put a lot of value and identity in occupation and seem to start blaming anyone they think they can when stuff falls apart.
This area is seeing a rise in right wing support because just like a lot of the center states folks feel forgotten, work isn’t what it use to be and pivoting is harder than blaming marginalized people and honestly it’s hard to find grounding when bellies are grumbling.
The work:
So it got us thinking… If value is subtracted from productivity, perhaps most of this wouldn’t be so much of an issue. This installation piece tackles the concept of unhinging the correlation between what we make, who we are and where we sit in society. We painted a mantra of ‘value does not equal productivity’ and ‘productivity does not equal value’ on rolls of paper that we found in the factory. We then assembled these pieces on the wall to create a sculpture falling out of a hand coming out of the building. This was done as a reminder that there is more to life than work and what we make though it is important to make. It’s important to also understand what and who we’re making for.
The Protectors.
Of course we had to bring our people with us. This is an iteration of our piece called the ‘Protectors’. There are a couple figures in the collage that are images from the US archives of people who were sharecroppers and/or former enslaved people. We incorporate these figures into this collage because it’s important for them to be dignified and there’s something incredibly satisfying about bringing them all over the world to see what we see. I’m glad we brought them. As much as we enjoyed ourselves, being ‘othered’ is exhausting.
Speaking of dignity, taking responsibility…and all things that come with making amends, here is an observation. It’s seems way easier to be apologetic when you don’t have to live/deal with/see the folks you are apologizing too. It’s like apologizing to relics.
This is all intersectional.
The lesson: the people who have been the victims of the atrocities are the ones who determine if amends have been made/proper reconsolidation have been put into place. It is never determined by those that have inflicted the atrocities. They were never qualified to do that, thus the atrocious acts.
NEW GROWTH
NEW GROWTH
50’W x 15’H mural
We were invited to Edmond OK to create this piece for Sunny Dayz mural festival. We decided to focus on New Growth. The term new growth is often associated with chemically-altered textured hair and transitioning hair, new growth is often easily detected. It appears thicker, with greater texture–when relaxed hair begins growing out, and/or is seen as the person’s natural hair color–if hair has been color-treated.
We used this analogy when creating this piece. The concept of growth is organic, expressive and sometimes scary. This piece is a celebration of transitions and the support that it takes to grow.
It’s a reminder that growth is wide, larger than us, and requires healthy roots.