SURFACE TENSION at The G@llery Evason

The G@llery Evason is not just known as Singapore’s only true HIP hotel. The hotel is rapidly becoming known as a venue for cutting edge contemporary art as well.

The hotel, which last year teamed up with LASALLE SIA – College of the Arts, for a long term partnership in “Arts in Alternative Spaces”, has recently opened up “Open Space”, a dedicated art exhibition venue at the ground floor of the hotel; further underlining its involvement in the art and entertainment scene in Singapore.

For 2001, a total of 16 shows and exhibitions have been planned in this venue; featuring both local and overseas’ contemporary artists and ranging from paintings, installations and sculptures to music, dance and poetry.

From 10-25 May, The G@llery Evason, in partnership with Earn Chen and Brazen / Phunk Studio, is host to SURFACE TENSION; a show featuring American and British designers and graffiti artists. The show aims to bridge the gap between contemporary arts, music, fashion and inner-street culture and offers a first-time chance to see this quality graffiti art in Singapore.

Artists included in the show are Americans FUTURA2000, Lee Quinones and Stash and British born She-one. Besides the art works, the artists will also exhibit other samples of the work in which they are involved, like fashion, album design and labels.

During part of the exhibition, renowned Japanese chill-out DJ Krush will spin the turn-tables to create the ambiance and add to the experience; while the artists will be available at “Open Space” to meet up with the public and press during the first few days of the show.

The Artists

She One

She One would like to be known as simply that. Official documents reveal that this artist was born as James Choules in 1969 but for the last 16 years it has been She One. London-based but rapidly gathering acclaim from New York and Tokyo, She One produces art that takes the original forms of street graffiti and ends up with work that is altogether different in context. Taking early inspiration from the New York subways and how these moving canvasses became a giant gallery traveling through the urban sprawl, She One adopted graffiti style as his prime form of expression during his teens. It wasn’t just the available materials ­and cans of spray-paint for rapid marking, but also the idea of a OEname¹, or a tag, being art. Hence She One was created in 1984; not just as a name but now also as a subject.

The style, however, is identifiable by the quietly dramatic works that is now his signature. Calmly executed paintings that often seem like an ambient wash of color, occasionally pinned down by utilitarian stencil type or urban scribble. These are softly emotive, yet edged with an urban sensibility. The street references are oddly recognizable, but removed, like some déjà vu memory that vies for attention. It’s an angular abstraction that is "conspicuous, yet discreet; simultaneously severe and tender, subdued but prominent" described i-D Magazine (Dec 99).

It is this elegance of minimalism that drew such positive accolades from both art critics and buyers, as well as the original New York subway artists, such as Crash, Daze and Lee Quinones, when She One held his first New York showing in the summer of 2000.

A meeting with Crash after they were introduced by Eric Clapton (an avid collector of graffiti paintings) led to the project 'CRASHEONE - NEWYORK VS LONDON ' a set of collaborative paintings, due to be exhibited later this year in London/Paris/Brussels/NYC/ San Francisco/Detroit. They also have a range of New York VS London t-shirts available through new London clothing brand CHOKE.

SHE ONE has also collaborated and designed fabric and t-shirt prints for Dexter Wong & BoxFresh in London as well as brought out his own shirts in limited runs. He currently has four prints selling for Gingham Inc. Japan under the label - 'LondonBlood'

His work has been commissioned across the industry including work for: MoWax/NinjaTune/BigDada/Warp/Skint and XL records.

Recent shows in England:

GRAFFITI RETAIL @ BROWNS FOCUS. LONDON

PAINTINGS EXHIBITED IN STORE. T-SHIRTS AND HAND MADE BOOKS.

NEWFLAMES @ AIR GALLERY. DOVER STREET. LONDON

NEW PAINTINGS

GRAFITI RETAIL2 @ SUMO STORE/GALLERY. SHEFFIELD

NEW PAINTINGS. T-SHIRTS AND LIMITED EDITION SCREENPRINTS.

She launched himself online in 2000 with his website “sheone.co.uk” to introduce the world to his vision...........

Futura 2000

When 15-year-old Leonard McGurr formulated a graffiti-writer name for himself in 1970, he chose Futura 2000, a name derived from his admiration of the Futura typeface and his lifelong fascination with science fiction, in particular Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was an identity choice that would prove to be prophetic, as Futura's creative styles and applications would always be years ahead of most of his contemporaries.

Soon after Futura took to the trains, it was easy to distinguish his work from that of his peers. Instead of the cartoon-and-lettering work that typified street art of the time, Futura employed a much more abstract, minimalist style that stood out because of its subtlety. Although Futura's distinct work denied comparison, when the graffiti art movement first began to be recognized by the media, his style was thought to have been clearly influenced by that of Kandinski, whom Futura had never even heard of.

By the late 1980s, most of the standouts from the street-art movement had disappeared from the public eye. Futura, however, had found that application of his dynamic design skills could function in arenas other than the subway or gallery scenes. In the early 1990s, he and his new partner Stash, also a street artist with graphic design skills, began producing lines of clothing that showcased their design work. The success of the clothing lines eventually led to requests to do more design work, on everything from album-cover art to action figures. Futura and Stash continue to sell their wide array of work through international galleries and their chain of Recon shops in the U.S. and Japan.

Futura's current work, while far more advanced than his first work, still resembles that early work in its forward-looking aesthetic, often drawing upon abstractions of the iconic imagery of science fiction to portray his ideas. He occupies the rare position of an artist whose work is equally appreciated in both the pop-culture and gallery art arenas.

The continuing success of Futura's art and business ventures have more than established his identity as an important artist of the past, present, and future. He has come to embody a standard of originality and vision against which all subsequent artists may gauge their accomplishments.

Stash

Stash, who was born in August 1967, began his career by writing graffiti on trains and walls in the early eighties.

From 82-87, Stash started to work on canvass and other media as he took a major interest in graphic arts. In that period, his array included early published works by photographer Bruce Weber and the title logo for the film “Slave of New York”, in which Stash also had a short appearance. Other works in that time included TV commercials for Levi’s 501, Nintendo and with less glamour KFC while doing group shows in Fun Gallery NYC.

In the latter part of the eighties, Stash started to venture abroad with works mainly on canvass and joining group shows in NYC, Paris, London and Berlin. He learned using the MacIntosh as a medium of his arts and started doing logo work for various brands.

Stash started his design studio and label “NOT FROM CONCENTRATE” in 1990 with fellow street artists Futura and Gerb. Stash’s contribution included Phillies Blunt Krylon and the MC Search logo. When the NFC partnership ended, Stash started “Subway Visual Maintenance”.

His first trip to Tokyo resulted in a meeting with Nigo Skatethg and the two had a few fruitful sessions together.

In 1997, Stash started his new design studio and label project “Dragon with Blue (R.I.P.) and worked with Futura on concept and technique shops in Tokyo. In the same year, he conceived and curated a show in London called “Contents under Pressure”.

The opening of his own shop Recon in NYC in 98 was followed by the opening of other shops in San Francisco and Tokyo.

Of late Stash did shows in both Tokyo and Hong Kong.

He is currently working in NYC with his project Dragon Subway Studio as the designer for Recon, Subware and Project Dragon while doing freelance graphics for Bathing Ape, Burton Snowboards, Gravis, Brooklyn Machine Works, Motive and Undercover.

Lee Quinones

Along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lee Quinones was one of the key innovators during the early days of New York's street art movement. In keeping with his tradition of innovation, Quinones was also one of the first street artists to transition away from creating murals on trains and begin creating canvas-based paintings. The 1979 exhibition of his canvases in Claudio Bruni's Galleria Medusa in Rome introduced street art to the rest of the world.

After the mid-80s, Quinones's work manifested itself primarily on canvas. He came to prefer this medium as it enabled him a broader selection of colors and paint types to work with. "There are people who see the Graffiti experience as a vocation of adolescence, the rites of passage without a sense of direction," Quinones explains. "I'm not surviving by offending it or defending it, but I saw it early on as a catalyst to develop as a painter and explore the other horizons outside of a 40-foot subway car. My sense of art was to create art without any reference points to art history, because this was art history in the making. A true art movement never goes by the script. Instead it flips the script, faithfully reinventing itself.

While much of his current work continues to embody the energy and movement that typified his early work, it is thematically and formally much more complex. Quinones's art has always essentially been a search for a greater metaphor than for mere topicality. His trains of the past, along with his murals and canvases of the now, have consistently distilled his own journey into self awareness within broader, more universal, themes. For Quinones, the personal experience, the consciousness of who he is and what he feels, is the jumping-off point for an epic urban mythology in which the message is conveyed in an immediate and accessible language as spiritually allegorical narratives. On the dawn of fathering his first born, the new works arrived with their richness in energy and beauty. They flirt with the subliminal comedies, contradictions, and taboos that form our existence.

In this increasingly technological age, for which the online experience has become the new arena for information exchange, Quinones is well aware of the heroic and mythic dimensions of the street. His vision is a continuum of romantic rebelliousness.

DJ Krush

KRUSH was born in 1962 in Tokyo and is considered a gifted producer and DJ with a superb sense in mixing and composing with his sound who's been well-received in the international club scene. It was the movie "Wild Style" however that got him into hip hop in the early 80's and in 1987, he formed KRUSH POSSE which made numerous appearances in various media as the best hip hop act in Japan.

KRUSH began pursuing his solo career after the break-up of the group in late 1992, and soon grabbed people's attention as the first DJ to use turntables as live instruments such as doing free sessions with live musicians on stage.

His first album "KRUSH", released in January '94, placed his mane on the global scene, and since then, he's been working internationally as a producer, re-mixer, DJ and recording artist. In the spring of '98, he formed a production unit called RYU with DJ HIDE and DJ SAK.