evan roth

Evan Roth is a bad ass mother fucker.

No really.

Google it.

Other than that, he is an extremely creative artist who “explores the intersection of free culture and popular culture, making work simultaneously for the contemporary art world and the ‘bored at work’ network” as described on his website. I find this to be particularly relevant in this current day in age when the lines between these two audiences are more blurred than ever. With the advent of social media and an exponentially growing number of technological outlets available to anyone and everyone, it’s become harder and harder to separate any one “world” from another, and Roth’s projects speak to, and take advantage, of that.

The project of his that I find most captivating has to be his “Graffiti Taxonomy” project, in which he catalogues letters from graffiti tags found all over New York and Paris into extensive taxonomies of various styles and fonts. This meticulous organization blends together the free, loose nature of graffiti with the painstaking precision of science, and the result is both a visually appealing work of art and an inventory, or thesis, of a scientific research project.

For his Paris study, the 10 most commonly used letters (A, E, I, K, N, O, R, S, T, and U) were documented, most in both capital and lowercase letters, while the New York alphabet is currently in progress. An interactive version is found here.

I really love this project – definitely one of my favorites. It’s clever, witty, and inventive all in one. Considering the fact that I constantly doodle in different made-up fonts every day in class and graffiti-ing something for real is currently on my bucket list, it was the visual impact of Graffiti Taxonomy that first caught my attention. Subsequently recognizing the archival nature of these letters however, I realized that this project incorporates my personal as well as artistic interests.

Roth takes the data and content already floating out there in the world, on streets and subway trains and dark alleyways, and revives it into something entirely new. What was formerly mundane and overlooked is transformed into something polished and organized, while still inherently retaining its raw nature and connection to its roots. Even with the pristine presentation and perfectly spaced rows of these letter taxonomies, there’s no mistaking this project for anything other than graffiti. Even when extracted, displaced, and re-presented, the essence of street art is not erased. This dichotomy of form and function, between what Roth has generated and what the original graffiti artists had harmoniously clashes, if that makes any sense. How, where, and why these characters were previously and are now presented are in opposition, but instead of discord, Roth manages to seamlessly weave everything together.

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All images used with permission of the artist.

artist’s website:

http://evan-roth.com/

http://evan-roth.com/graffititaxonomy

jenny holzer

Jenny Holzer is a conceptual artist perhaps most well-known for her Truisms series, in which she posted a variety of statements and aphorisms (“truisms”) around the city, on anything from lampposts on the street to an LED billboard in Times Square.

Perhaps I am just inept at using Google, but I’ve had a hard time digging up images of this or any of her other work and her contact information. On her main website however, http://jennyholzer.com, there are gorgeous pictures of a body of work entitled Projections in which she casts large-scale projections of various phrases onto buildings in cities all across the world.

Florence 1996

Buenos Aires 2000

Turin 2003

New York 2005

Naples 2006

Paris 2009

Though Truisms probably relates more closely to my own post-it notes project wanted (as seen on my website: http://wix.com/nanzhu/art, there is something remarkably interesting about the undulations of light in Projections, in particular the complex interplay between opacity and transparency in both the actual text and the architectural features of the buildings themselves, including windows and pillars. I’m a huge fan of text-based art and though light projections are expected to be as flat as can be, here they cover each of the buildings in such a way that they become sculpted in their own right, with grooves and shapes seemingly impossibly carved into these otherwise fragile letters. The text itself is molded into minute crevices and stretched across broad panels of the sites, and in turn distorts the shapes of the buildings as well in some sort of almost-visual illusion.

Holzer’s work does a great job of course at initially attracting your attention, and the phrases and words she chooses are quite ambiguous, emotionally charged, and poetic. Looking beyond those however and examining the intricacies of the work, I have become much more infatuated with the textures she is able to generate with what I had always considered to be such a gentle medium. Holzer’s manipulation and juxtaposition of light and these solid, strong, and famous buildings show that maybe opposites do attract. This brings me back to my own work, where I have yet to experiment with surfaces that are not purely two-dimensional. I am not planning on exactly entering the world of 3D or sculpture, but experimenting with something that retains the pristine and clean aesthetic of my work yet is still malleable and can be mixed together with some alternate type of surface that isn’t paper may help move my work in a related but new direction.

All images extracted from artist’s website at: http://jennyholzer.com/