Ron Caplain

Street art is many things- it is the rush of putting it up, it is color, it is the written word, it is murals, it is stickers, it is stencils, it is wheat pastes, graffiti and mainly it is public. I have gotten very interested in this in the past few years and have explored New York - Brooklyn, Harlem, Soho, The East Village, The Lower East Side; as well as Boston, Providence and Fall River-New Bedford. 

Karen Nash

I’ve had a long-standing love-hate relationship with the debris that’s cast up on the shores of our urban environment. I’m fascinated by the shapes of things, and if I find an appealing shape put out for trash collection, I claim it. Some of these castoffs are innocuous, but some are not. Some are downright dangerous to us and to those who come after us. Several of the pieces in this show are meant as heartfelt warnings.

NY05-24-06

I have met many people associated with it and with the hip hop culture of which it is a part. Not only are the people fascinating, but the work is truly exciting.  In photographing this, I have tried not to just photograph someone else’s art work, but I have tried to make this a unique piece and of the photographer’s eye.  This has been done by abstracting part of the work and by giving it place and uniqueness. I can only say it has been great fun.

PACKMAN and AUNTIE GAIA are both made of polystyrene, a substance that pervades our daily lives in the form of coffee cups, plastic utensils, meat trays, packing materials, and many other applications. Walk down any street on trash pickup day, and you’ll find polystyrene in almost every bin, all headed for the landfill, since it isn’t accepted for recycling. Oops!  PACKMAN is completely made of packing materials, except for the wooden dowels and wine corks that make up his fastening system. The same is true of his consort, AUNTIE GAIA, whose name is wordplay: Auntie = Anti, Gaia = Mother Earth.

Our emotional environment has changed dramatically since September 11, 2001. This is expressed by “cocooning” in our homes, fencing in our property, obsessive home improvement, corralling both work and entertainment into our homes, and posting yard signs with our opinions so that nobody will come to the door to ask. Yet there’s bad news on the doorstep, on the TV screen, on the RSS feeds on the computer monitor. I’ve put my feelings about this into SAFE AT HOME, which started with an abandoned safe door, and went downhill from there.

NY10-13-04

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA GARGYRL and SHE CAME IN THROUGH THE BATHROOM WINDOW are companion pieces that both evolved from the same batch of salvaged mannequin parts. The Gargyrl came first; when I started playing with the parts, they just came together into this funky pose, which wrote its own story, not about a child, but about a young gargoyle. As this character took shape, I realized that she was female – a Gargyrl.

That left an arm and a leg from the original set of parts. For a long time, they stuck out of my parts bin, nagging me. I wasn’t going to waste them on a cheap gas price joke, but then I came across the window sash in the cellar, and the rest is history!