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New downtown Brooklyn hotel boasts artwork from more than 77 local artists
BY Erin Durkin
DAILY NEWS WRITER
Tuesday, September 20th 2011, 4:00 AM
Published: Monday, 28 February 2011
At The James New York, a new art-centric hotel in Manhattan's Soho, the permanent in-house collection was assembled by an independent curator, Matthew Jensen, in collaboration with Artists Space, a neighbourhood artists' collective; each of the hotel's 14 guest room floors is dedicated to the work of a single New York-based artist. Public areas are also prime exhibition space: _QWERTY 5_, a mosaic of thousands of recycled keyboard keys, is installed on one wall of the entrance foyer, custom-created for the hotel by the artist Sarah Frost. Constructed entirely from scavenged materials, Frost’s pieces examine the remains of consumer culture and – fittingly for a hotel installation – the imprints of users left behind.
“The sculptural work and the outdoor work in the hotel is unified by the fact that the artists are using reclaimed materials,” says Jensen. Other public art installations in the building include Elevator, by Korean artist Sun K. Kwak, a striking, graphically patterned piece that utilises cut black vinyl to create a design in the white elevator shaft, visible as the hotel’s glass elevator moves up and down between the first-floor foyer and the third-floor sky lobby. “I like the fact that it references the motion of water and a gyre,” says Jensen. He adds that it is also probably the most adventurous piece in the hotel – the artist worked in the elevator shaft with the elevator hanging above her.
Jensen envisioned the hotel as “a series of halls in a tall, narrow museum” to display the show, titled Stand Here and Listen, 14 floors of new paintings, prints, photographs and works-on-paper by emerging artists who are using landscape as a conceptual element in their work. The corridors of each floor function as dedicated gallery space, and informational placards by the elevator include barcodes that are scannable by smartphone, so that viewers can find out more about the artists-in-residence.
During a recent stay, I found myself on the 16th floor admiring the blurry, ephemeral oil paintings by Christopher Saunders, a 2010 Fellow in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His paintings have a perfection about them – Jensen says that Saunders labours to get an inkjet-print precision – but there’s an abstraction, too, with floating houses and dappled reflections; his artist's notes show a concern with the transience of landscape: "Landscape can be used as a medium with which we are creatively involved, a locus for the interplay of orientation, identity, memory, and the poetic possibilities of misrecognition." Since my room was on the 16th floor, I got to see Saunders’ work more frequently, and every time I embarked and disembarked from the elevator, I had the opportunity to become more familiar with it.
The shape of the hotel and its configuration influenced Jensen’s choices and his take on the idea of art in residence. “Because you stay on the floor, you get to know an artist’s stuff a little bit better, and I like that,” Jensen says. He intends each floor to be its own exploration of the notion of public and perceived landscapes, playing with the idea of a dedicated “viewing spot” that occurs in popular tourist destinations. “Because of the tight confines of the halls, you’re pretty close to the work, and it’s quiet and intimate. And despite the difference in medium and theme between the artists, there’s a horizon line in almost every work. There’s always a place to stand.”
Bonnie Tsui lives in San Francisco. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and the author of American Chinatown.
BY: DEIRDRE KELLY
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Dec. 10, 2010 1:19PM EST
Last updated Friday, Dec. 10, 2010 2:00PM EST
The James
27 Grand St., New York; 1-800-230-4134; www.jameshotels.com. Rooms from $349; no eco-rating.
The original James in Chicago is known as a hotel of luxury. This second James, open since September in New York’s vibrant SoHo district, is every bit as haute but will no doubt become known as a hotel of art. The young and friendly staff includes a full-time curator, Matt Jensen (a 29-year-old photographer whose work was acquired this year by the Metropolitan Museum of Art), who selects original artworks to adorn each floor of the hotel. The works are by mostly emerging artists with a connection to SoHo, the Manhattan neighbourhood that has become the art world in miniature.
DESIGN
With its undulating steel-and-glass tower rising 18 storeys above SoHo next to historic Duarte Square and LentSpace, a new public exhibition park on nearby Canal Street, The James stands out as the new kid on the block. The spanking new sleekly designed tower sparkles like a beacon of cool amid the converted factories of bordering Tribeca.
Inside, floor-to-ceiling glass walls make everything appear bathed in sunlight and open for enjoyment. It’s a thoughtful, smart idea from the Office for Design and Architecture in collaboration with Perkins Eastman. In fact, every detail is a tour de force throughout the hotel, from the custom interiors by Amanda Sullivan to artisan John-Paul Philippe’s wrought-iron numbers on the doors (a reminder of SoHo’s past as an iron-ore centre).
The entrance off Grand Street, at Thompson, is through a narrow glassed-in corridor where a concierge desk stands in the shadow of the first of many original artworksQWRTY 5. The lobby doesn’t feel like a lobby as much as an uber-chic living room, with art books everywhere and, after 5 p.m., wine bottles open for pouring.
AMENITIES
Softening the hotel’s industrial edge is a multitiered outdoor urban garden designed by the award-winning landscape designer Rebecca Cole. The garden will supply fresh herbs to the two in-house restaurants that are scheduled to open by month’s end. Also on the roof is an outdoor pool and capacious bar and lounge offering spectacular 360-degree views of Manhattan.
ROOMS
The guest rooms are spacious, with unobstructed views of Manhattan due to the hotel’s location next to a public square. The one-bedroom suites, with their king-sized beds and separate living room with two large-screen TVs, have a mini-bar crammed with such SoHo area treats as Dean & DeLuca chocolate chip cookies and Kee’s Chocolates. Sleeping here is a dream, thanks to smooth cotton sheets and linen duvets with shams by Fili D’oro. The open-concept bathroom features a walk-in shower, soaker tub and radiant-heat marble floors, plus a series of dimmers for ambient lighting. One of the switches activates a screen that can close the bathroom off from the bedroom. Try it – the screen is actually another commissioned artwork.
SERVICE
General manager Colin Gold refers to the easy, breezy way his staff has with guests as “luxury liberated.” Guests help themselves to pots of coffee and fresh baked goods in the lobby every morning, or a glass of wine with nibbles in the evening. Also at their disposal are three computers offering free Internet access and printing, and complimentary luxury car service around Manhattan or to and from the airport.
FOOD AND DRINK
The hotel restaurant opens in early February led by chef David Burke. Expectations are high. There is room service, but at the moment it is wanting. A request for orange juice resulted in something that tasted like Sunny D, hard-boiled eggs were cold.
THE VERDICT
Art and a feeling of spaciousness are The James’s hallmarks. It is also deliciously close to great restaurants and shopping (Chanel is just a stroll away) so even if the eggs aren’t how you like them, SoHo itself offers plenty of alternatives.
The Hotel as Art Gallery
The New York Times
By DIANE CARDWELL
Published: August 29, 2010
The James, a sleekly designed hotel rising over Grand Street in SoHo, will open for business on Wednesday with all the support staff a guest could expect: a concierge, receptionists, bellhops, chambermaids, parking valets.
 Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times - Matthew Jensen, the art curator of the James Hotel in SoHo, chose works from emerging artists for the hotel’s 14 floors of guest rooms. “It was pretty exciting to me to see how many artists are working, just like I do, like obsessively hard, in their own studio tucked away, but nobody’s really paying attention to them yet,” he said. “There’s a lot more emerging than established in New York — once they’re established, then they all move upstate. So everyone who wants to do it is doing it here.”
Hotels have been hanging fine art on their walls for decades now. Ian Schrager commissioned a series of Robert Mapplethorpe prints for what is considered the original boutique hotel, the Morgans, in 1984; the Roger Smith, a small property in Midtown Manhattan, transformed its lobby into an art gallery and performance space as part of a 1991 renovation.
But few have gone so far as the James, which hired a young artist, Matthew Jensen, to select original artworks to adorn each of its 14 floors of guest rooms.
Mr. Jensen, 29, a photographer whose work was acquired this year by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, may have an unusual job description, but he is also part of a growing breed. As business and building owners look to inject their properties with a little artistic personality, a new class of curators — some of them contractors like Mr. Jensen and some of them staff members — has arisen to help.
“There’s all these empty walls and there are thousands of artists out there who are living in the city and have never had their art seen by anyone,” said Leah McCloskey, who places works by students at the Art Students League in restaurants and apartment and office buildings. “It’s about connecting to that generation of artists and to what’s going on out there.”
 Employees installing art in the hallways of the James.
All that, and one helping hand a guest might not expect: a hotel art curator.
That connection has been particularly important in the past few years for hotels, which are increasingly seeking novel ways to distinguish themselves from a flood of competition. Responding to guests’ desire to have their lodgings project an image of who they are or aspire to be, hotels are taking their artistic endeavors more seriously, industry analysts say, using art to build an identity rather than just to make it look good.
“Hoteliers are not only trying to come up with a theme or a style that attracts customers, but they are approaching it in a much more professional and involved way,” said Sean Hennessey, chief executive of Lodging Investment Advisors, a consulting firm in Valhalla, N.Y.
“It used to be that you could get away with just slapping something up in the lobby,” he added, “but more and more customers are looking and evaluating it much more closely.”
For the James, meeting that demand has meant trying to reflect the artistic microclimate of SoHo. Though many of the artists who once made the area a creative mecca have fled, an emerging art scene is still represented through nonprofit institutions there that support artists and show their work.
Denihan Hospitality Group, which is developing the hotel, operates another James Hotel in Chicago that is also dedicated to emerging art. At the Surrey, one of its New York hotels, work by established names like Jenny Holzer, Claes Oldenburg and William Kentridge nods to its location on East 76th Street, near major art showcases like the Whitney Museum of American Art.
 An installation by Sarah Frost of typewriter keys glued to a wall in the lobby of the James.
Mr. Jensen’s relationship with the hotel grew from a chance meeting last year with Brad Wilson, the chief operating officer at Denihan, at an exhibition for Mr. Jensen’s project “Nowhere in Manhattan,” featuring billboard-size photos of the borough’s remaining wildernesses that are meant to spur people to visit those places.
“It’s a way to remind people in a subtle way, if they complain, ‘Oh, I never get out into the woods,’ well, you can just get on the A train to Inwood, or you can go in the other direction to the Rockaways,” Mr. Jensen said.
The pictures appealed to Mr. Wilson — who hung three of them on the building facade when it was under construction — and Mr. Jensen’s job evolved from there. Once hired, he settled on the idea of using New York-based landscape artists working in different media, one per floor.
Using an online database, he amassed a list of about 1,000 artists, which he whittled to the final 14 in three months, creating something that “kind of feels like 14 solo shows stacked on top of each other.”
Taken as a whole, the installation, called “Stand Here and Listen,” is meant to play off the idea of travel, inspired by signs at revered destinations like the Grand Canyon that urge visitors to look out from a particular spot, Mr. Jensen said.
 The owners of the James, which is scheduled to open on Wednesday, tried to reflect the artistic microclimate of SoHo.
One of the artists, Jessica Cannon, said the installation offered guests — perhaps more open to seeing things differently because they are removed from their everyday routines — the chance to experience art in a new way.
“You can have this encounter with work that’s very intimate, almost like it’s in a home or an empty gallery, but you can have it on your own time,” said Ms. Cannon, a painter whose work imbues landscapes with a sense of an impending event. “If someone’s got insomnia at 3 in the morning, they can pace the halls and have a really intimate and personal encounter.”
In addition to curating the hotel art, Mr. Jensen manages the studio of John-Paul Philippe, a painter and designer who created several decorative elements for the hotel, including the room numbers. Mr. Jensen has also been overseeing the installation of the collection — the hotel bought the works — and the text that goes with it, along with a potential catalog.
Mr. Jensen said the curatorial foray, his first, took him to studios all over the city, exposing him to a whole community of artists.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 30, 2010, on page A13 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/nyregion/30hotelart.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion
Guerrilla activists hack 85 Toronto billboards, replacing ads with art
by Ashleigh Ryan
August 23, 2010 at 11:50 am
 A hacked sign at Queen Street East and Jarvis Street (Image: Gary Campbell) Four months after Banksy’s stop in Toronto, another group of guerrilla art activists has taken to the streets—only this time, the evidence isn’t hard to find. A group of anti-establishment art pundits known as the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover (TOSAT) is on a mission to replace illegal billboards in Toronto with art they’ve collected from around the world. This past Sunday, the movement’s founder, Jordan Seiler, led 15 activists around the city to remove ads from 41 Pattison Outdoor pillars and replace them with 85 pieces of art.
The group claims Pattison has not complied with Toronto’s new billboard laws and is shirking its tax obligations. Last April, the city initiated a new billboard tax that would generate $10 million in revenue, at a cost of $850.68 to $24,000 for billboard companies. Rami Tabello, coordinator of illegalsigns.ca, told the Star he estimates there are 30 to 40 illegal Pattison billboards that were built “without permits mostly in the middle of the night.” Tabello insists he’s not part of TOSAT but concedes that his by-the-book method of filing Freedom of Information requests to track down illegal ads is an uphill battle. “Our motto is ‘We fight illegal billboards with the rule of law.’ The rule of law, unfortunately, is not quite working at the moment,” he said.
According to the Star, Adam Vaughan, city councillor for the Trinity-Spadina ward where seven Pattison pillars were targeted, says an enforcement team for illegal billboards is being assembled in response to the apparent frustration with the rogue signage. “It’s a big city, and we’re getting to it,” he said.
Who will get to them first? We’re banking on the rebels, if only because they’re so much more amusing.
Toronto ads fall to guerrilla art
http://www.cbc.ca
Tuesday, August 24, 2010 | 4:55 PM ET
Members of a group of activists calling themselves Toronto Street Advertising Takeover papered over advertising with art throughout the city this weekend.
The group (TOSAT), which invited some media outlets to witness their activities, said they were taking back public space from illegal ads.
Members of the guerrilla group took covers off standing billboards and papered ads over with graphic art, paintings and anti free-market sketches.
The art attack affected 41 advertising pillars, and 20 to 25 larger billboards, many of them owned by Pattison Outdoor Advertising.
TOSAT organizers claimed they specifically targeted ads that were illegal.
On Monday, Jonathan Goldsbie, a member of the Toronto Public Space Committee, defended their actions.
Goldsbie’s non-profit group is unrelated to the art activists, but also has an interest in protecting the city’s shared common spaces and has been involved in Toronto’s efforts to change ad bylaws.
He told CBC News he believes many of the signs papered over with art may well have been illegal.
“Pattison and other companies have spent decades putting items in the public space, and doing so very frequently illegally. These are companies that have planted the items often without permission, often with deliberate disregard to the law, with contempt for council, with contempt for the citizens of the city,” he said in an interview Monday.
 Activist group TOSAT claimed members papered over ads that were illegal. (Susan Noakes/CBC)"
So actions like this one are partially an act of reclamation. It’s a matter of saying for whatever reason, the city has been thus far ineffective in enforcing its own bylaws, therefore we’re going to go out and be the change we want to see.”
Last December, the city created new ad policy and laws that provide for more effective enforcement. The bylaw includes a billboard tax.
Ad companies suing city
Goldsbie said he is concerned that the city, while it has improved enforcement since April when the bylaw came into effect, has yet to have an impact on illegal ads.
“In the meantime, advertisers continue to make millions of dollars with ads that they put up with knowing disregard for the law,” he said.
A group of ad companies is suing the city over the new bylaw, Goldsbie said, adding that ad companies probably hope they can force concessions from the city.
The TOSAT campaign was similar to an ad attack mounted in New York last year and involved art donated from Spain, Berlin, California and throughout Canada.
Artists and Activists Perform Large-Scale Guerrilla Street Advertising Hack
By Steve Kupferman on August 23, 2010 7:30 AM
http://torontoist.com/
Yesterday and last night, a group of artists and activists working throughout downtown removed ad posters from street-level advertising pillars, and painted billboards with whitewash. In place of the ads, they posted artwork.
The project, known to participants as the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover, or TOSAT, had been months in the making, and was highly organized. All involved were operating under strict secrecy.
The group planned to hit forty-one advertising pillars, and twenty to twenty-five 10′ x 20′ billboards. Most of the ads chosen for this treatment were property of Pattison Outdoor Advertising, an ad company that maintains many advertising signs of various types in Toronto. Billboards owned by CBS and Astral Media were also hit. TOSAT organizers claim that they specifically targeted ads that were illegal. Torontoist cannot say with certainty that any of them were.
How TOSAT Took Over Toronto’s Street Ad Space
By Steve Kupferman on August 23, 2010 2:25 PM
http://torontoist.com/
A few days before the action, some of the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover’s participants met in the living room of an apartment in a home in the west end. Posterchild, the pseudonymous Toronto street artist (and Torontoist contributor), and Sean Martindale, another Toronto street artist (whose work we’ve seen before) were playing host, as we all waited for Jordan Seiler, a New York City–based street artist who was going to lead the project, to arrive.
Posterchild is something of a renaissance man, with slightly geeky tendencies. He offered us home-brewed beer out of a two-litre plastic soda bottle, and then lectured us on the chemistry of DIY alcohol production (it’s complicated). Martindale has a more contemplative personality, and when he spoke it was always after deliberation. But Seiler, when he arrived (an hour late), came on like a tornado of febrile mannerisms, messy hair, and rapid-fire ideology.
“Instead of this being a destruction of private property, it’s an intervention,” said Seiler, halfway through an explanation of his attitude toward street advertising, a pet peeve of such long standing that it’s not even really a “pet” for him anymore; it’s a monster.
Seiler has been performing his own street advertising hacks for nearly a decade. Nine people were arrested over the course of the two street advertising takeovers he organized and led in New York City in 2009, but all charges were dropped after ninety days. Was he concerned about the legal ramifications of interfering with private property in a foreign country, without the protection of a false name? “I haven’t thought too hard about the international issues, but in regards to using my real name, this is not a joke,” he said.
“They know we have a bizarre sense of duty to this,” said Martindale, “and that this is not something where we would fold under a legal threat.”
For its organizers and many of its participants, the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover, or TOSAT, represented an opportunity to reclaim Toronto’s streets from what they saw (and continue to see) as the deadening effect of corporate art on the public realm.
“When you walk through the city and you know you have no control over that space, it’s like walking through a mall,” said Posterchild. “It’s more about feeling at home. And it’s impossible for me to feel at home in my city if I don’t feel I’m a part of it.”
“They’ve already reaped quite a bit of profit off the city illegally, with impunity,” said Seiler, referring to the fact that street advertisements are sometimes erected in violation of municipal law, both in New York and Toronto. For TOSAT’s organizers and many of its participants, this was the original impetus for the project.
But Seiler, and Seiler alone, takes a hard-line stance: “As far as I’m concerned, I could give a fuck if they’re legal or not,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned as an artist and an activist, outdoor advertising has no place in public space.”
TOSAT was hatched in October, after the successful completion of the second of Seiler’s New York Street Advertising Takeovers, or NYSATs. Some Toronto artists, including Martindale, participated, and became interested in doing something similar closer to home. Over a period of months, Seiler, Martindale, Posterchild, and a woman named Vanessa (who didn’t want her last name printed) slowly brought other participants into the fold, secretly enlisting volunteers to scout locations and later install the artwork, which had been solicited not only from Toronto, but from places as far away as New York, Madrid, and Moscow.
TOSAT also needed a target. Pattison Outdoor Advertising was selected, both because of the ubiquity of their street ads, and because, TOSAT organizers allege, Pattison’s ads frequently violate municipal billboard laws. (We don’t actually know for certain whether or not the targeted ads were illegal, for reasons we’ll get into shortly.)
The action would focus on twenty to twenty-five 10’ x 20’ Pattison billboards (and also an assortment of billboards belonging to other companies), and forty-one street-level Pattison “pillar” ad columns, which are those four-sided illuminated columns that sprout from parking lots and other street-side locales all across the city. The pillars, in particular, have been a bone of contention for activists.
“The Pattison pillars were identified as illegal by the City after my organization filed complaints against them. They were built without permits mostly in the middle of the night,” Rami Tabello, the public space activist behind IllegalSigns.ca, told us. Tabello says he had no involvement in TOSAT, though the project’s organizers used Tabello’s site to determine which Pattison signs were in violation of Toronto law. Randy Otto, president of Pattison, declined to comment for this article.
(At publication time, IllegalSigns.ca’s homepage had been taken over by hackers, so we’re not linking it here. Tabello is in the process of bringing the site back online.)
The City has had billboard regulations on the books since long before amalgamation, but enforcement has historically been lax. Post-amalgamation, enforcement problems were exacerbated by the fact that each former municipality had its own regulations. Anyone interested in policing sign placement in Toronto had to be conversant with six bylaws, instead of one.
Earlier this year, City Council passed a harmonized bylaw that finally established a single set of rules for billboards and signage in Toronto. Any ads that were legal under the former set of laws but illegal under the new regime were grandfathered, and some of the pillars could fall into this category, which would make them legal to maintain, but illegal to replace. Signs that are completely illegal can be that way for any number of reasons, including having too many display faces, being too big, or even being too close to other ads. The rules are different depending upon how the ad’s installation site is zoned.
In part because of those complexities, we are as yet unable to confirm that all of the ads targeted by TOSAT were illegal. What’s certain, though, is that Pattison and several other advertising companies have erected illegal ads in the past. Before the new bylaw came into force, these companies flooded the City with variance applications in an attempt to grandfather their ads (a “variance” is a form of official permission from the City to violate a bylaw in a minor way), mostly to no avail. These same companies, including Pattison, also promptly sued the City over the “billboard tax” established along with the new bylaw, part of the purpose of which was (and is) to fund enforcement.
When the bylaw passed, the City pledged to create a dedicated enforcement unit for signage infractions, but the unit isn’t yet fully in place, and many illegal ads remain on the streets.
On Saturday, we arrive on the second floor of a downtown bar, where an assortment of fifteen or so artists and activists sits in a circle of chairs around an LCD projector, waiting for the briefing to begin. Posterchild arrives, and we ask how participants will go about defeating the locks on the Pattison pillars.
“It’s actually rather poetic,” he says. “You use a doorknob.”
Seiler calls the room to attention and loads up a slideshow. He begins to impart his expert knowledge. It’s like a university lecture: Special Topics in How to Fuck With Street Advertisements.
As it turns out, there are only four items one needs in order to hack a Pattison pillar: the doorknob, naturally, but also duct tape, a step ladder, and a Phillips head screwdriver. Participants, Seiler said, would meet at a house somewhere downtown and pick up all these items, along with a phony letter of permission, which would say: “Pattison Outdoor has graciously donated over 20 Core Media Pillars to the Municipal Landscape Control Committee public arts program division,” among other completely fictional things.
Seiler said participants would split into teams of two or three and pile into cars—some borrowed, some rented—and do the deed throughout downtown, over the course of about two hours on Sunday afternoon.
At midnight, a second team, led by Vanessa, would go out into the city under cover of darkness and hit twenty to twenty-five 10’ x 20’ Pattison billboards.
“I don’t necessarily want to say exactly what we’re doing. But I can say that we’ve strategically planned how to get up there and how to effectively beautify billboards,” Vanessa told us.
“The tactics that we use are creative and they’re peaceful. And who can fuck with that?”
Sunday is the day. We get into a car with Steve C. and Alex, two TOSAT participants, and ride deep into Cabbagetown, where a pair of Pattison pillars stand in a Beer Store parking lot.
Steve and Alex go to work. An ad for Amsterdam beer is replaced by a painting of a silhouetted woman leaping through space. A Koodo ad is subbed out for an enormous stylized bird creature, done up in dazzling bright colours. TOSAT stickers are placed over Pattison logos. Most people pass right by, seemingly oblivious. But Richard Bingham and his young son, Liam, stop to look.
“Is this guerilla?” Bingham asks Steve, and Steve shows him the letter. Bingham nods. He has no reason to disbelieve the cover story.
“I love it. Absolutely love it,” he tells us. “Public visual space is a little too owned by companies like Viacom and CBS, so it’s refreshing to see this.”
Liam, who is perhaps eight years old, spends some time looking over the artwork with his dad. Then, after everything has had time to sink in, he points at a side of one of the pillars that Steve and Alex haven’t gotten around to, yet. “That’s an advertisement,” he says, matter-of-factly, as though the idea of a distinction between art and salesmanship has occurred to him in concrete form for the very first time in his life.
Photos by D.A. Cooper/Torontoist.
More photos of the new pieces are collected in our report from earlier today.
Guerilla action aims to turn advertising space into public space
Toronto Star
Published On Mon Aug 23 2010
Liem Vu Staff Reporter
 
Video: Swapping ads for art
Is it vandalism? Vigilantism? Watch, as activists take down ads and replace them with art. (Aug. 22, 2010)
A lanky, 6-foot-tall New Yorker dressed in black, maneuvers through Toronto armed with an electric screwdriver, duct tape, a stepladder, and a doorknob. His target: A four-sided, Pattison ad pillar.
He removes a screw; inserts the doorknob and cranks open the frame as nearby sirens sound. Within minutes, he is gone, having replaced the ads with art.
One down, 41 to go.
His name is Jordan Seiler, the founder of the Public Ad Campaign, an initiative committed to reclaiming public space from what the campaign contends are illegal advertisers, and filling it with guerilla art.
On Sunday afternoon, Seiler led 15 activists into a war against Canadian billboard giant Pattison Outdoor by removing ads from 41 pillars and replacing them with 85 pieces of art.
“Public space should be a place for public communication,” said the 30-year-old. “I feel like I have a right to react against (advertisements) when, in particular, they’re done illegally.”
The Star was unable to confirm the legal status of the signs targeted by the group, and efforts to reach Pattison Outdoor for comment Sunday were not successful.
Dubbed the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover, TOSAT for short, six ground-level teams of two to three piled into four rental cars Sunday afternoon.
Around 5 p.m., the group left the ‘safehouse’ near Casa Loma with art submitted from around the world including Spain, Berlin, California and Canada.
According to local activist and co-organizer Vanessa Moraless, the action was prompted by what the group argues is Pattison’s non-compliance with Toronto’s billboard laws.
Last December, the city passed a billboard tax ranging from $850.68 to $24,000, which would contribute $10 million to city coffers.
On April 6, 2010, the new sign bylaw and tax went into effect — to the relief of anti-advertising advocates and to the dismay of billboard companies like Pattison, which filed an action against the city with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to contest the law.
Local activists are concerned that the city is still being too lax with the enforcement of bylaws.
“Pattison built them without permits mostly in the middle of the night,” contends Rami Tabello, coordinator of IllegalSigns.ca.
Tabello has spent the past four years filing Freedom of Information requests to track down unauthorized ads for his website while working with the city to remove them.
He estimates around 30-40 Pattison pillars in the GTA are illegal, but added that he had no connection with Sunday’s guerilla action.
“My organization is not related to TOSAT. Our motto is ‘We fight illegal billboards with the rule of law.’ The rule of law, unfortunately, is not quite working at the moment,” he said.
When contacted Sunday evening, city councillor Adam Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina) expressed disapproval of the action, but noted that the city was on top of the issue.
“I can certainly recognize the frustration that the illegal billboards haven’t all been taken down, but it’s a big city and we’re getting to it,” he said.
Seiler’s installations went down Bathurst St., and seven of the Pattison Pillars he targeted are located inside Vaughan’s Ward 20.
An enforcement team for illegal billboards is currently being assembled, Vaughan added.
“The Pattison Pillars . . . were a hangover from a previous councillor,” Vaughan said. “It’s not clear as to how they were approved.
“I know its in contention with a lot of billboard activists but we’re trying to deal with it with the bylaw,” the councillor noted. “We should have an answer for those people who are concerned there are too many of them very shortly.”
Seiler finished his installations around 7 p.m. Sunday as teams around the city were also wrapping up.
Pedestrians marveled at the pieces of artwork and at times, engaged with Seiler and other installers.
“It’s a mental leap that most people don’t have a chance to engage in,” said Seiler. Ads, he added, “are improper mental stimulation. The idea that we feel like we don’t have ownership (of public space) becomes problematic.
“If these projects prove that we do have ownership, it also questions whether or not there’s a force preventing us access to that,” Seiler said.
See the original article here: http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/851126–guerilla-action-aims-to-turn-advertising-space-into-public-space
Brooklyn Immigrant Artists Shine in ‘Non-Native’ Show: Showcase at de Castellane Gallery in Boerum Hill
By Harold Egeln
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
published online 08-17-2010
BOERUM HILL – The rich cultural heritage of recent immigrants who came to Brooklyn fills the spacious de Castellane Gallery in a remarkable, timely exhibition titled “Non-Native New York.”
The breadth and depth of this fascinating international art show on display through Aug. 22 was a year in the making. Curators Linn Edwards, a fine art photographer, and Brian Bell, an art-book publisher, visited the 15 selected artists in their spaces, spending lengthy quality time with them while delving into their lives and work.
The results are an astonishing celebration of diversity, the creative process, new perspectives, their native lands and this country’s challenges. The artworks are shown in a multi-dimensional venue and were propelled into reality by a community arts grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council.
“In a sense, this show is democratic. It reflects the phenomenon of living in Brooklyn regardless of native land,” said Bell and Edwards in their curatorial debut, noting the distinct character and populations of Brooklyn neighborhoods. “Newcomers ease old ones out, borders of neighborhoods overlap in changing ways, and artists find new methods to translate their experiences into art.”
Their vision, emerging from struggles, is robust and refreshing, as seen in the two large rooms that make the gallery at 525 Atlantic Ave., owned by painter and muralist Hans de Castellane. The show and sale coincides with the raging national debate on immigration.
Clinton Hill artist Jee Hwang from South Korea portrays communication barriers in a multilingual city. Jung Eun Park, also from South Korea and now living in Clinton Hill, paints simple box houses tied together by thread, the thread being a tribute to her grandmother.
Francisco Correra-Cordero, who settled in Bushwick, saw echoes of his native Tijuana in his new neighborhood’s street scenes and made a Bushwick-Tijuana link in his photographs.
Bensonhurst artist Mahtab Aslani, born in Tehran and a refugee from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, says she came from a “cultural vacuum.” She is a painter of floral and plum colors on lingerie, where the cloth forms waves into the lovely patterns.
In his busy Jamaican street scenes, Kingston-born artist Taganyahu Swao creates life’s constant movement, a positivity which is shown in his brown-tinted paintings where children soar skyward on swings.
Russian Maria Kondratiev of St. Petersburg, now in Williamsburg, delves into fantasies that are portrayed in her pen-color etchings. Her art kept her active as a child, and now she works at an art therapy school.
Parisian Emile Dubuisson, a documentary filmmaker living in Greenpoint, displays 12 photos he took with a simple handheld camera in Siberia years ago. The photos were originally of poor quality, but today’s digital technology has restored them to their black-and-white clarity.
“Tattoo culture” is displayed with a whirling-dervish joy in Kyoto-born Yuhi Hasegawa’s “The Dance,” a huge canvass by the painter, who now lives in Williamsburg. It’s a contrast to Taipei-born Hai-Hsin Huang’s paintings of public scenes retrieved from government web sites, such as children in an exercise regimen.
Videos included London-born Gautam Kansara of Williamsburg featuring his family scenes and Polish-born Olek of Gowanus showing his colorful crocheted latex balloon bodysuits.
Also seen are reused security envelopes decorated by Toronto-born artist Sarah Nicole Phillips, now of Gowanus; an intriguing pine tree landscape painting by Caracas-born Minori Sanchiz-Fung of Lefferts Gardens, and the sleeping horse and playful dogs of Ontario artist Jaclyn Conley, now in East Williamsburg.
Setting the show’s tone is German-born Lothar Osterburg of Park Slope with his triptych of black-white photogravures of scale models of old sailing ships exploring “new worlds” on Earth. This will be the last weekend for the exhibition. For more details visit NonNativeNewYork.com and deCastellaneGallery.com.
Non Native New York got coverage today on NY One. Take a look at the clip by clicking here.
Also, a little article on the NY1 website:
New Exhibition Showcases Works Of Non-Native New Yorkers
By: Shazia Khan
Taiwanese native Hai-Hsin Huang moved to New York three years ago to study art.
“I heard people say artists should be in New York, so I just came to New York,” says Huang.
Huang creates paintings filled with dark humor, based on public images found mostly on government websites. Her work is currently on view at de Castellane Gallery in Boerum Hill, as part of a new exhibition called “Non-Native New York.” Brian Bell and Linn Edwards co-curated the show.
“[Brian] is from Ohio and I’m from Pennsylvania and we’ve been in New York, we’ve seen tons of New York art, but we just really wanted to see art that was from a whole different perspective than our own,” Edwards says.
“With my work now, I’m actually going to India more often in my adult life and starting to think about being Indian again, or being India in general and what that might mean,” he says.
Works by 15 artists from countries like Japan, Iran, and Jamaica are on display. Submissions were only open to foreign-born artists living in Brooklyn, a request the curators say was received with some criticism.
“We got a lot of slack for that because some people were like I lived in New York all my life, why should I not be represented?” explains Bell. “But we felt that being a non native, you have a lot of difficulties; it’s hard for you to get into the art world.”
But some of the foreign-born artists actually hesitated to submit their work when the original outreach material used the word immigrant instead of non native.
“I’ve had conversations with some artists who said I didn’t initially want to apply to this because I didn’t feel like an immigrant, like the word immigrant might have sort of a negative weight to it these days, as if an immigrant might be more desperate or running away from political pressure,” says Edwards. “Whereas a lot of these artists, I say for the most part, these artists have chosen to come to America whether for a [Master of Fine Arts] program or just to further their study in creative inspiration in America.”
The artists who spoke with NY1 say there is no better place to do so than in New York.
“I feel more pressure to do something,” says Huang. “But, at the same time, I feel more comfortable to do whatever I want to do.”
In the ever-competitive New York art scene, an effort is underway to make sure non-native New Yorkers are also represented. NY1’s Shazia Khan filed the following report. They say they wanted perspective from artists like Gautam Kansara, who submitted a video installation. Kansara, who was born in England to Indian parents, moved to California at the age of five and recently found a home in Williamsburg. He says this confluence of cultures has seeped into his art, in which he often explores identity and relationships.
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