Modart Skates Back into Town
Art Papers Magazine
San Diego Review by – Julia Morton
Jan/Feb 2001
Skateboarding was the common link that connected the 120 artists exhibited at the third annual Modart Festival (Reincarnation Building, September 8-17). The non-conformist lifestyle and camaraderie associated with board sports have nurtured a "skate" aesthetic, and the related sports industries provide visual artists with creative employment and magazine exposure.
Though traditional galleries represent several artists, the general group attitude is defiantly anti-art-establishment. Recognizing the artist's unmet need to exhibit their "real art," San Franciscan Mona Mukherjea-Gehrig, Los Angeles designer Shaney Jo Darden organized the event and hung the exhibit in a spralling, abandoned farmer’s market.
The drive to create an immediate visual impact fueled much of the work. Themes covered anxiety, humor, testosterone, homelessness, oppression, and human vs. post-human life. Visual influences included comics, sci-fi films, machines, and mass media graphics. Though many images were better when considered as illustrations, and some works were too plagiaristic, the overall excitement and momentum the event generated were genuine.
Painting, the show's dominant medium, featured three styles Comic-Angst, Plastic Cubism, and Fantasy-Realism.
1) Comic-Angst is the style that gave the skate-art movement it's start. It captures the rough beauty of nature, and the dangerously competitive sensibility of the skate/surf lifestyle.
Shepard Fairey has exhibited in all three Modart shows. His simple compositions designed to incite satirical consciousness shaped the formation of the "skate" aesthetic. Displayed in a grid were Fairey's black and red poster series of historical world leaders overlaid with the image of Andre the Giant and printed commands such as "OBEY."
Dave Kinsey also used the street poster format, and his screen-printed series depicted the aging of a cruel yet pathetically comical military man.
Amanda Ayala's graphic series drawn from an evacuation guide follows an average-suited man to an airplane's emergency exit; then, he shows how to unlock the plane door, opens it for us, and jumps out.
2) In the Comic-Angst category, the image is engaging, stupid, and memorable because it brings to mind the random rationality that frames our fantastic beliefs.
Yormik's "Ducks" looked like walls spontaneously marked by passing vandals and featured a red-washed wooden panel with a surprised duck-like cartoon drawing. The duck's body is whitewashed and filled with graffiti, print, and scraps of paper. Following the creature are splotches of color and puffy white letters spelling out 'Ducks.'
Signing his paintings Dalek, artist James Marchall represented humans as bloated cartoon minnows swimming through a sea of faded media, land minds, and emotional slabs of color. Marchall describes his method as "layering the ages," his works expressed the perils of rapid development.
Scott Lenhardt is interested in depicting the contrast of ever-expanding technology against the limits of our primate brains. Lenhardt created three small sentimental yet sinister paintings using classic techniques to create a smooth finish. The first is an isolated space-suited figure lost in a hostile environment, the second is a fur-covered caveman standing by a speeding stream, and the third is a deer timidly pausing in a clearing surrounded by a tall, dark forest.
3) Plastic Cubism plays off the idea that reality is made of layered perspectives.
Raul Cardenas Osuna's plywood paintings create an optical illusion of shadowy, well-armed soldiers hidden in abstract shapes and aggressive color combinations.
Garry Davis used mounted layers of cutout plastic shapes and colorful paint to compose a multi-dimensional image of a menacing cat.
4) Fantasy - Realism toys with the intersection of reality and fantasy.
Peter Halasz painted a man (waist up) in a hat and overcoat dancing with his hands above his head like a wild ballerina. Blown away at the edges by an intense flash of light, the green image looks like a photo taken in a dream.
Josh Hassin, interested in how the media informs our emotional experiences, painted an airliner just as its wing begins crashing into a San Diego building. Painted in soft focus grays that mimic a newspaper photo, Hassin's imaginary accident incites locals' fear because the San Diego landing strip requires planes to fly mere yards above buildings.
Nate Martin's large format color photo portraits symbolize defiant youth and capture his sitter's quirky personality. In one, a young man balanced precariously on a railing proudly displaying his bleeding skateboard injury, and in the other, a young woman slumps on a porch swing with one arm wrapped around a gigantic toy ball, a burning cigarette held firmly in her pouting lips.
Aaron Reagan displayed two mounted handmade travel journals. Centered on the open pages, horizontal bars are outlined in multi-colored tape and filled in with sliced photos, spots of texture, scattered drawings, and backstage stickers. Like a music video on fast forward, we sense friendship, sound, confusion, motion, boredom, and adventure in this abstract diary.
Isolated by choice and mainstream indifference to those who refuse to illustrate dry theories, these outcast artists, now self-aware, are defining their own aesthetic. Its energy is undeniable, and its value is obvious to those who recognize the importance of raw authenticity.
