A Conversation with Michi

A conversation between Ming Donkey and Atlanta-artist Michi Meko at the opening of  Michi and Born’s show, Pure/Surrender, at Atlanta’s Beep Beep gallery. Earlier that night, July 10, Ming Donkey and his Left Field partners had their own opening a few blocks away at Young Blood Gallery.

[Ass First Into Dream by TindelMichi]

This conversation took place around midnight, so everyone was in that late-night state of zealousness triggered by fatigue or alcohol or both.  But I just happened to have my voice recorder handy, so with the permission of all involved, I turned it on. What follows provides insight into the passion and general supportive of Atlanta’s indie-art scene.

Michi, on an artist he met at Art Basel: The kid’s paintings are fucking hilarious, they’re just these candy corns, and they’re singing hip hop, to the hip, to the hop, and I’m just like, I gotta meet this kid…

Austin Healy [print artist and student at Creative Circus]: What’s his name?

Michi: Matthew Rodriguez, Mattie D. We hit it off, putting up stickers on scooters and shit, and I’m just a big fan of that kid. I’ve seen his work before, and it’s funny, you know? Candy corns? He’s just this wiry kid from Texas. He did something for the Deitch Gallery parade…

Keep reading at Juxtapoz.

Born and Michi at Beep-Beep Gallery

And my Atlanta saga continues…

(Born, “Be”)

After “It Came From Left Field” at Young Blood, I headed to Beep-Beep to catch the Michi and Born show, “Pure/Surrender.”  Both of these artists are considered Atlanta street-art royalty, although Michi Meko’s history lies in illustrative characters, while Born is a tried and true, old-skool graf writer, who has recently been in the news over a Beltline mural dispute. (FYI, Beltline is a park project involving former railway turf—Atlanta’s answer to Manhattan’s Highline.)

But the work at Beep-Beep is neither overtly illustrative nor graf-based, and any paint involved was (most likely) not spread by the hands of these artists. The entire show is a poetic configuration of found wood and metal scraps. Even so, their earlier influences are present,  and despite the seamless melding of their work, these artists are exploring different ideas.

(Born’s graf, pic from www.flickr.com/photos/brookenovak/sets/364618/ )

The Left Fielders at Young Blood

I’m just now getting around to writing about “It Came from Left Field,” which opened July 10 at Young Blood in Atlanta, featuring Ming Donkey, Herb Rieth and Jason Baldwin. The show’s up till July 31, if you’re in the area. Added bonus *you get to walk through Young Blood’s adorable, hilarious and altogether astounding boutique of booty* on the way to the gallery. Happy treasure hunting!

The show was reviewed in Creative Loafing, and if you want to know more about Ming Donkey’s Worker Art and all it’s -isms (capitalism and fascism, a la the Greedy Diner; the misplaced idealism of Niagara Falls; the disenfranchisement of the factory workers without hands; and the search for truth by the light-bearer, Franco the Kid), feel free to peruse (the complete text of!) Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. Or read the short version–Ming Donkey’s artist statement.

Ming Donkey’s finished installation

My new fave of Herb Rieth’s. I dig the sense of motion. Does the pocket hold a secret?

Keep reading at Juxtapoz.

Conversation with Ginger Williams, Illustrator

Once featured on Juxtapoz reader art, Ginger Williams is piecing together a living out of art and illustration in the small city of Jackson, Miss. She holds a series of part-time jobs—a collection of odd duties at the Mississippi Art Museum, teaching art to kids via an urban assistance program called Operation Shoestring, selling her personal work through the occasional gallery show and cranking out hundreds of commissioned, affordable portraits—a gig that picks up tremendously around holidays. When I first met Ginger five years ago, she was 25 and in the midst of planning an art-trip to Paris. She wanted to take a Parisian apartment for several months, spend time with some extended family, host a series of creative friends passing through Europe, and sketch cafés and landmarks. It seemed very dreamy, like a throwback to Gay Paris of the 1920’s.

At that point (2006), any of Ginger’s non-commissioned work was highly personal. She painted her grandmother as a young woman, she painted her friends and her boyfriends, she painted herself as an Elizabethan queen or an orphaned child or a fragment of a weeping face. Highly affected by the unexpected death of her mother in 2002 and a few years later, the Katrina-wreaked destruction of Gulfport, her college town, Ginger’s art became an outlet for her pain and unwavering faith—the sense that there is connection beyond the tangible, the power of spirituality and beauty, a heightened sense of fate and a purpose behind everything. In 2004, sporting a fresh B.F.A. from William Carey University, Ginger moved back to her hometown of Jackson and became an integral part of a small, informal collective, a handful of twenty-something, Mississippi-bred local artists. They pulled pranks and painted murals, held all-night photoshoots, ran errands and went to dinner dressed as altar-egos. But by 2005, the group has begun to disperse, moving to separate towns, starting their separate careers. The trip to Paris was to be a fresh start, the beginning of the rest of Ginger’s life. Keep reading at Juxtapoz.

Erica Flannes

With the exception of her time at Rhode Island School of Design, Erica Flannes has spent her whole life in Jackson, Mississippi. She’s a fine artist (“if you can call it that,” she scoffs), a tattoo artist and to many people in our small city, an anomaly. Rather than know Erica, it seems you know of Erica. Mythologies form around this girl. I have a friend who used to spot her at the mall, peering at the sickly-yellow world behind a thick veil of dark hair. For some reason, he decided that she is essentially Allie Sheedy’s character in The Breakfast Club—which makes her awesome in his book. She has a shy-tuff thing going on. When you see Erica out at night, which is rare, she’s an elusive figure in heavy eyeliner and killer hairpieces, a girl who seemingly speaks only in response. Yet the photos (often self-portraits) that create her morphing online persona depict a vampy starlet, a burlesque queen, a storybook heroine, or dozen other archetypal femmes that ooze, in various parts, danger, surreality and sugary-sweetness. But this online persona also seems disarmingly candid and loyal. She promotes her friends’ bands, their artwork or, through her own photographs and paintings, her friends’ themselves. During the day, Erica keeps things flowing at The Inkspot Gallery, a hip tattoo-parlor-cum-pop-art-space. She covers frilly dresses with gingham aprons before aiming her gun at others, and often she tattoos in heels.

She’s also the only artist in the shop with a prep school education and study abroad (Italy) decking her resume. Both her personal work and her tattoos share illustrative sensibilities, but I’m most impressed by her profusion and her range of styles and mediums. She spans the spectrum from macabre to whimsical, referencing among other things, art-deco, French royalty and Tom Waits. Erica’s work is accessible and often humorous. And for all the swirling hype, Erica comes across as genuine, friendly and, for a girl with 40-odd tattoos, surprisingly wholesome. She loves her dogs, she goes on mission trips, she wants to do well at work, and basically she’s just living and creating as it comes to her.

Keep reading here and here.