GHETTO MAKE OVER: 2011

December 2011

November

HAHA profile on artgypsy check it out http://www.artgypsytales.com/2011/11/regan-stencil-wall.html

Issue 1 of KNOCK KNOCK online magazine by Blomtrog features street artists from around the world check out HAHA's page http://issuu.com/blomtrog/docs/knockknockissue1

VEXTA on Art Nation ABC http://www.abc.net.au/arts/tv_radio/art_nation/
VEXTA in december issue of Harpers Bazaar

Fred Fowler features in 2 exhibitions this month check out below ;

LARGER THAN LIFE EXHIBITION - THE SUBSTATION 15 - 27 November

As part of this group exhibition I'll be showing a large mixed media piece and a new carved wooden mask.

Opening night - Thursday 17th November - 6:30 - 8:30pm

http://www.bigwest.com.au/index.php?id=186&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=125&cHash=b09f5a49a0b10c455f9d82ce95b98230

VCA GRADUATE EXHIBITION - 22 - 27 November

I'll be exhibiting several new bronze sculptures and bronze masks in the Baggaley space.

Opening night - Monday 21st November - 6 - 8pm

http://www.vca.unimelb.edu.au/events?id=282

Kirean is rising funds to release a new comic book called Regan, click on the link to check it out
http://www.pozible.com.au/index.php/archive/index/4270/description/0/0#info

Read more comics here http://thehahaconspiracy.tumblr.com/

The Outpost festival on Cockatoo Island in Sydney features some of Australia's best street artist's that includes Kid Zoom, Antony Lister, The Everfresh Crew , Vexta plus many more http://www.outpost.cockatooisland.gov.au/index.html

VEXTA hard at work.

VEXTA Outpost piece

HAHA Micheal Jackson wall

CIVIL stencil of Captain Thunderbolt one of only 2 convicts to escape from Cockatoo Island

October

HAHA Exhibition in Auckland, New Zealand entitled 'PERSONAL HEROES' 18 October - 5 November 2011 http://www.orexgallery.co.nz/artist_pages/Tamanui_PersonalHeroes.htm .

Born in Hamilton in 1972, Maori artist Regan Tamanui (aka HA-HA) lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. Entirely self-taught, Tamanui spearheaded the Melbourne stencil movement in 2002. He is now regarded as Australia's most prolific and skilled stencil artist to date and is represented in major national museums, private and corporate collections.

In his first solo exhibition in his home country of New Zealand, Tamanui presents Personal Heroes, a retrospective portrait series of New Zealand's beloved rugby players to coincide with the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

Invoking 19th Century colonial portraits of the 'noble savage', Tamanui's players of Maori, Pacific Island and Pakeha descent are at once signifier of historical colonialist hegemony, and critique of contemporary corporate globalisation.

Personal Heroes reminisces on Rugby Union's history before the truly professional era was ushered into the corporate board-rooms like John the Baptist’s head being presented before King Herod. In this series, Tamanui explores themes of 'the working class man' the 'corporate team vs individual'. These themes perhaps serve as an allegory for contemporary culture and the 21st Century decline of community. However we see them these are rugby heroes, individuals who played for the team, mixed with the team, and tried hard to be one of the team. In essence they played for glory; team, individual, personal, but there was no talk of playing for the corporation, the advertisers, the sponsors, the brand.

The formation of high powered, financially focused, corporate groups whose specific purpose was the offering and selling of TV rights, sponsorships, naming rights, logos and merchandise for everything, (including whole competitions, games, clubs and personal appearances), heralded the beginning of the end of the amateurworkingman’s sporting hero. Now everything was to be merchandised, homogenised, packaged, presented, televised, serialised, and advertised. Everything was for sale. There was to be no difference between man and product, one is the other and everything had a barcode, a stamp of approval and ultimately a use by date.

Where once team players worked to support their collective sporting endeavour, their home-side, home-town, or home-country, now corporate money demands they play the corporate game. They are ‘in business’ to make ‘business’, they are wheels in the cogs of corporate machinery, finely tuned, fiercely competitive, financially fixated on the boss’s wishes, celebrity and fame bringing home the brand and the bucks.

Personal Heroes is Tamanui's lament for the passing of the mantel ‘Individual Hero’ over to ‘Corporate Property’.

Ron Hemi

September

YOUNG & FREE exhibition in San Francisco featuring 12 of the very best in Australian street art http://youngandfreeart.com/ Anthony Lister, Kid Zoom, Vexta, Dmote, New2, Dabs & Myla, HAHA, Ben Frost, Reka, Rone, MEGGS & SOFLES AT 941 Space,

Ben Frost HAHA stencil