Raised in Berlin, Sao Paulo and NYC I now live in Los Angeles. I'm a rocker mom, wife, art collector, culture vulture and founder of this digital enterprise. I take pictures for a living.
www.reggieworld.com
The Boneyards launch party was Friday night in LA. The clothing and stores collaboration launched June 21. Punk rock music, smoke machines, hot dog stands and carnival prizes accompanied the launch to showcase the sneakers. The exhibition-installation upped the ante for product launch parties. Much of the inspiration for the installation came from 80's NYC art legend and underground conceptual sculpturer Cady Noland. (more about Cady later) In New York, Kids were waiting in line overnight to see the new line. A mixture of biker, flannel, motorcycle high and low art, tattoos and San Pedro chic . I am proud to say I worked on some of the images in the Boneyards newspaper launch. Location images were shot by art director Rob Abeyta, then converted to analog slides that I projected over the models like tattoo artist, John Hall. Pretty cool. Here are some pics. Official Boneyards site

Danielle Decker and Undefeated's Jupiter, FUCT's Erik Brunetti and myself, Rob and Christina Abeyta with daughter Engracia, a carnival worker from the launch and Skate photographer and Tokyo pal Rip Zinger.






It was one of those gorgeous spring days in Tokyo. The cherry blossums were starting to come out, and so were the kids. I headed over to Yoyogi Park to take some photos. Yoyogi is one of the largest parks in Tokyo, located adjacent to Harajuku Station and Meiji Shrine in Shibuya. It is peaceful, beautiful and on a sunday afternoon, the place to see young Tokyo.

What I love about Japan is that the people are so refined and regal, they care about their cities and the elegance of nature. Notice these teens brought an ashtray to the park instead of using the ground. They also sell ashtray necklaces that people use to stub out their butts so they dont have to litter the streets. It's sad that teens smoke--yes, but at least they don't litter and smoke.

This gentleman didn't quite get the "youth culture" thing but you gotta love that he's out there just reliving it.





This exhibition brings together two artists - Daniel Guzmán (born 1964, lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico) and Steven Shearer (born 1968, lives and works in Vancouver, BC, Canada). Both artists work in a variety of mediums exploring issues of male identity, extended adolescence, rock culture, death, and the seductive ambiguity of self-portraiture. Experiencing their work, one immediately sees a parallel adoption of 1970s and 1980s pop icons and bands as surrogates and personal avatars.
Daniel Guzmán draws. His work is a tidal wave of drawing that also becomes a dynamic inventory of drawing styles. His myriad influences range from Aztec codices, Haight-Ashbury psychedelia, comic books from his youth, and Mexican muralists, particularly José Clemente Orozco. The topics of Guzmán's drawings fuse old gods with current events, cultural idols, inventories of deadly sins, and cardinal virtues.
Guzmán's sculpture is a natural extension of his drawing techniques. He uses the simplest of materials to sketch a three-dimensional incident and establish encounters with the magic realism of the everyday. In much of his work there are two levels of interpretation - what it is (the sum of its parts) and what it signifies (the poetry of its allusions).
While it is impossible to think of Guzmán's art outside of the context of Mexico, it is equally impossible to ignore the wider cultural context provided by the United States and the world beyond. It is the ease of his citations (be it William Burroughs or Roberto Bolaño, Bruce Nauman or Kiss) that creates a floating universe of sublimely mismatched equivalencies.
Steven Shearer curates collections. He maintains thousands of digital files from which his art is evolved and created. In service to his work, Shearer harvests the aspirations of those souls wandering on the Web, riffing on air guitars, catching their zzz's, selling their stuff on eBay, or posing as the stars they yearn to be. From these enormous files, Shearer creates collage accumulations that are epic documentaries of the possessions and the poses of a slacker paradise.
Shearer also paints the ghosts of the Web. His portraits of anonymous adolescents and fallen teen idols are replete with the keyed-up color of the Symbolists whom the artist admires, but they also come with the subjects sheathed in a psychedelic aura that has vibrated around metal bands for decades. It is, in fact, the names and lyrics of metal bands from which Shearer derives the acid-etched poems that are reminiscent of William Burroughs' cut-up techniques.
Shearer's sculpture has grown to be an increasingly important part of his work. It comes with narratives that imply design as a tool for character reformation and psychic healing. Like the music Shearer references, his sculpture is both a narcotic promise and a harmonic convergence.
The exhibition is organized by Richard Flood, Chief Curator.
Copyright © 2008 LipstickTracez and reggie