NYAB Event - Karlos Cárcamo, Kaves, Burton Machen “Crossing the Lines”

Karlos Cárcamo, Kaves, Burton Machen “Crossing the Lines”

Hionas Gallery LES

This event has ended.

Hionas Gallery presents the group show Crossing the Lines, comprising new works from artists Karlos Cárcamo, Kaves, and Burton Machen. Each man is a product of New York City street art (Cárcamo from Queens, Kaves from Brooklyn, Machen a transplant from the south), emerging at a time when graffiti and vandalism were indistinguishable to most. “There are thin lines that some artists just won’t cross for fear of a faltering career at the hands of a tyrannical audience,” wrote Niko Nelson in an August 2012 profile of these three artists for Art Nouveau. This exhibition will showcase the artists’ varying styles and approaches, as well as demonstrate that when brought together, there is more to the street than meets the eye.

Cárcamo is expanding his vocabulary of hard-edge abstraction with a sampling of new paintings, smaller in scale than his previous works. The positioning of horizontal and vertical forms and his careful layering of colors and graffiti tags has grown more dynamic, now incorporating an elementarist’s combination of diagonals to the hard-edge series. The artist will also be unveiling a new wall-mounted microphone sculpture, in which he manipulates the microphone stand using a pipe bender so that it resembles a graffiti tag replete with trickling excess paint in the form of a dangling mic and chord.

Kaves will be introducing a series of new smaller scale vignettes of his native Brooklyn, which include the gently curved lamppost at the intersection, an iconic symbol that has become a signature in many of the artist’s works over the years. Also on view will be his 2012 mural of The Beastie Boys, produced as a tribute to the late great Adam Yauch aka MCA, and rendered from a 1985 photograph of the group by Glen E. Friedman. This mural gained wide acclaim last year when a blow-up image of it, including accompanying MCA lyrics from The Beasties’ song “Sure Shot,” popped up on the Sunset Strip in LA.

Machen’s contributions come from his continuing and renowned Urban Evolution series, in which he posts portraits throughout city streets and allows both the elements and pedestrians, over time, to have their way with the static image. Machen then photographs the end result, which in fact is no end but simply another stage in its evolution as a tenuous yet telling piece of the city it calls home. One new work is an unusual triptych comprised of the same photo of an unknown woman in a row of three. The varying manipulations that come from tearing and condensation make each image unique and yet together, by happenstance, they result in a superb tableau of color.

Media

• Painting
• Other

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