From beginnings in Stuttgard, Frerk and Marc C. Woehr have developed a style bringing street art into a realm of off-balance darkness. The atmosphere of their collaborative work looks like the product of the Brothers Quay reshaping an urban environment and all the characters emerging from it. While their work has appeared in publications and galleries all over Europe, their first show in the US will kick off at LA’s Carmichael Gallery on July 9th. Also, check out some of the Woehr’s work alongside Shepard Fairey’s at Art Basel Miami.

Rebellion, in any form, has a few consistent characteristics. The color black, for instance, is a common accomplice, as are hot tempers, cool demeanors, and five o'clock shadows. However, the most important element to rebellion is the one thing that has nothing to do with its surface, and everything to do with its soul.

That thing is energy, and it manifests itself in art, words, sounds, and – we would argue – in the new men's fashion line Public School. Founded by Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne, two Sean John ex-pats, Public School embraces the attitude of young New York, utilizing the creative rebellion of the city's well-cultivated steam as its source of inspiration.

As Public School draws closer to its second season, it has become apparent that the line's expertly directed construction, touchable materials, and lust-worthy lines are here to stay. Join us as we chat with its two designers about their goals, their drive, and what it takes to make it all come together.

Joshspear.com: The way you describe Public School on the website is almost philosophical. Can you tell us a little bit more about the brand's approach to culture, energy, and change?

Public School: Everything we do is a product of the culture we are immersed in. Music, film, art and fashion – its all energy, energy that we use for inspiration and try to put back into the world through our product.

READ MORE…

Scott Rench (aka: Yosoh) has the kind of story we like to read about. An accidental designer and an unconventional artist, Scott fell into his current jobs in advertising and ceramics by chance, when a friend introduced him to a little program called Photoshop. Now, over 15 years later, Scott splits his time between developing effective ad campaigns for clients like Sony, creating shirts (and sinks!) for companies like Threadless (whom you no doubt remember from a recent SpearTalks), and accompanying his art to places like Art Basel in Miami Beach.

Lord knows it’s hard enough to do one thing well, so the fact that Scott has experienced so much success within all of his occupations — particularly after adding fate into the equation — is no small feat. Here, Mr. Rench discusses his past, his present, and how it was that the one led so favorably to the other.

JoshSpear.com: Before you met Larry Geiger, where was your life headed?

Scott Rench: That’s really hard to say, but my guess is a very different path. In graduate school I really struggled with whether to focus my creative efforts on painting or ceramics. I found painting to be easier but thought if I needed to pay rent it would be a whole lot easier to sell coffee cups then $800 paintings. Sometimes the easier road is not necessarily the better one. I suspect I probably would have gone back to my painting roots. I have always been an image maker and the idea of making brown pots has never really appealed to me.

JS: Walk us through the time-line of your life, post-Larry Geiger and up to today…

SR: Well, as I mention on my site, I met Larry in 1992, and he opened my eyes to the computer as a creative tool. I was blown away by what Photoshop could do. I could never get on the computers at school cause the Mac lab was rather small and design students were always waiting for a computer. When I did manage to get a computer I could feel the eyes burning a hole through the back of my head. It was not until one Christmas break that I had uninterrupted access to the Mac. The chair of the department gave me and my friend the key to the building. So we spent about 15 hours a day there, sometimes in coats and gloves with no heat. READ MORE…

During college I had a brief love affair with a manual Nikon and a hopeful image of myself as the next Annie Lebowitz. Sadly, due to my inability to hold my arms still, an inherent aversion to darkrooms and irreconcilable differences with the light meter, the union was never consummated. But for those of you who managed the marriage of talent and skill and consider yourself a superstar shutterbug in the making, you may want to enter Surface Magazine's Avant Guardian competition. Now celebrating its tenth year, the competition touts itself as the premier promotional outlet for American photographers and is meant to bolster emerging artists up the career ladder to commercial photography success. To submit, visit the Surface site, where your goods will be Tim-Gunned by the mag's creative team and a panel of international industry judges. While the $50 entry fee may seem a little steep for starving artists, the rewards are certainly worth the investment. A handful of hotshots, whose work embodies the balance between art and marketability, will be chosen and given the chance to spec shoot using Surface's network of studios, stylists and fashion clients. These shots may or may not be used. Only the best work will be chosen and winners will either be published in the magazine's annual Avant Guardian issue or travel in a touring exhibition that visits arty urban locales New York, L.A. and Miami. Some pieces will be chosen for both. Since it is only open to up-and-comers, if you have been published prior to 2006 in magazines with a circulation of over 100,000, you’re ineligible to enter (and apparently, are no longer “emerging,” so congrats). If you are interested, get snappy! The deadline for entry is July 9 and you can submit up to 20 images.

–Mara Siegler

When Jamie and I were in Miami for what felt like an eternity covering all of the Art Basel events, we had a tough decision to make about where to stay– While we’re young and supposedly hip, we’re not big fans of the scene (nor the prices) on South Beach. We reached out to a handful of different hoteliers with our needs and surprisingly the Conrad Group was one of the few that didn’t turn up their nose. At first blush I was hesitant to stay at the Conrad– despite it being recognized as ‘Florida’s Leading Luxury Hotel’ in 2006 it was a little off the beaten path, downtown, and owned by the Hilton Group– and I’m much more of a boutique kind of guy. It turns out staying there for the week was a life-saver, although we spent a small fortune in cab rides to and from South Beach related events, every afternoon or evening we were able to get out of the mess to our own little safe haven. When we weren’t partying with Jose Parla or eating at Atrio, we spent a fair amount of time at the rooftop pool, enjoying the hot tub– an awesome surprise for those windy nights. As far as the room, we were showed to a residence– an awesome 2 bedroom apartment with a fully furnished kitchen, living room and decks with stellar views of the ocean. While I prefer to support independent hotels, staying here definitely exceeded my expectations. If they’re all this nice, welcoming and fairly priced, I’ll be keeping my eyes out for Conrad Hotel’s around the world.

I almost forgot to mention, while the other JS and I were down devouring art fairs in Miami, we had a chance to spend a few minutes hands-on with (fondling inside and out) the new devilishly-fast looking Audi R8. The car was a bit of a surprise, it was placed inside the entrance to Design Miami, the event was apparently entirely sponsored by Audi (the A8’s in the entryway with Zaha Hadid’s name in the window must have tipped us off). The fender flares were mean, as expected, and the interior as we had dreamed. We didn’t get to actually drive the car, but I could feel the 650hp turbo diesel engine just dying to be started– unfortunately, no keys in the glove box, under the seat, or anywhere to be found. We’ll check in with the R8 again this weekend at the Detroit Auto Show again, I’m sure. More eye candy after the jump.
READ MORE…

The new year is customarily ushered in with a big lit up ball dropping in New York City and a kiss with that special someone. For many of you, that customary kiss may have not gone as planned this year. Maybe your special someone was in a different location, maybe you don’t have a special someone, or maybe you drank too much and passed out before midnight. In any case, if you had been celebrating with Marlene Haring, your new year’s kiss (well, suck really) would have been contractually guaranteed. We found Marlene at the entrance of the Scope Miami art fair about a month ago, and we were impressed with her Sucking Marks exhibit for several reasons: it was, in every sense of the word, unconventional art; it was a cheap ($10) and sanitary thrill; and Marlene creatively redefined the relationship between the artist and the art collector. Aias Vargas put it best: “Like many of Harling's works, Sucking Marks $10 engages directly not only her ‘audience' but the rules society determines for the relationship between the artist and the collector, the producer and the consumer, the body and the commodity.” See some more photos we took of the ’sucking booth’ after the jump…
READ MORE…

The origin of the word ‘Metabolics’ comes from the word Metabiosis, meaning intermediary symbiosis: a more indirect dependency in which the second organism uses something the first created, however after the death of the first. Alexandre Orion’s work ingeniously captures the Metabiosis between Sao Paulo, Brazil street paintings and the photographs Orion captures in his Metabolics Project. We had a chance to see some of Alexandre’s work at the Photo Maimi fair last weekend, and it stood out as something truly special– a photojournalistic register that encapsulates ‘the endless duel between photograph and painting, that in the information era, makes us think of how fragile images are.’ Alexandre’s work can be found at the Foley Gallery, and you can also purchase the Metabolics book from his website, which has 80 pages, 12 x 12 inches, of Alexandre’s work.

While visiting the Scope Miami show last weekend, we had the pleasure of seeing some of Austrian Lois Renner’s artistic photography. Lois tries to hurdle the limitations of media with his large format photographs, and breathes a mysterious living quality into his paintings. Lois sees the studio as a “spatial situation and as [a] starting and crystallization point of artistic action and begins his analysis with it's miniature reproduction.” The work is interesting to look at to say the least– his pieces are full of nuanced details, object size illusions (at least I thought so), and a simultaneous blending and clashing of lines that can only be explained by seeing them for yourself. My favorite is ‘Sound 101‘ pictured here on the left.

Not all of the art gems we found while in Miami were at the organized fairs, or even at private showings for that matter; Josh and me discovered Ross Ford while walking down the pedestrian shopping plaza on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach during the Saturday lunch hour. I have to admit– I was drawn to the paintings at first because of their size, bright colors, clean (albeit curvaceous) lines, and contrast– they were pleasing to the eyes. Ross’ explanation of his work intrigued Josh and I even more– each painting is a face, pulled from a daily emotional diary of faces from his sketchbook. Ross puts brush to canvas for sketches he finds to be particularly significant. The final product is an organic type of emotional self portrait all his own (in every sense). When you go to the ‘paintings section’ of Ross’ website, click on individual photos within the photo matrix to see enlarged versions; it will also inform you of which ones are available for purchase. Ross Ford’s art was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise sensory overloaded weekend of art fair viewing in Miami. More on Ross after the jump…

READ MORE…

We viewed a wealth of amazing work at the Scope Miami fair over the weekend. Young Ryan Carr Johnson’s paintings were at the top of the heap for me. From what I can deduce, Ryan layers paint onto plywood and then refines the living daylights out of it with a hand sanding process. The result is awe-inspiring to see in person, because the art has such depth and structure to it– regrettably, I can only bring to you, our beloved readers, two-dimenstional images of Ryan’s work. The images I have included here are phases 2 and 4 of the piece entitled ‘Blotter Acid.’ Ryan’s work was shown as part of the gogo art projects initiative, which is Connor Contemporary Art’s attempt to incubate emerging and experimental art; it evolved from CCA’s annual Academy Exhibition of recent BFA/MFA grads from the Baltimore and Washington D.C. area–and appears to be a great program.

We hope you have been enjoying our ‘wrap-ups‘ of Art Basel Miami events we’ve been posting. The wrap-up format has its advantages– it allows us to bring a large amount and broad range of content to your attention all at once. The Art Basel fairs did, however, provide us with finds that we thought worth covering individually. For instance, I wanted one of these Snow Study V pieces we saw at the Photo Miami for myself as soon as I saw it in person. Doug & Mike Starn created this lamintated lamda digital c-print mounted to aluminum, but only made five of them. The process they used ingeniously draws out the detail of the snowflake to the viewer’s eye, allowing one to essentially see the coldness– or at least I thought so. They are available (or more likely at this point, ‘were available’) through Hackel Bury Fine Art Ltd. in London. I do reccommend, at the very least, that you track down some of this work at one of the Starns’ solo and group museum exhibitions, which will be going on throughout the U.S. and Europe in the coming months.

Our final stop on the ‘art train’ today was to NADA’s art fair here in Miami. The New Art Dealers Alliance has been active since 2002, and consists of a non-profit collective of professionals working with contemporary art. Their mission: ‘to create an open flow of information, support, and collaboration within [their] field and to develop a stronger sense of community among [their] constituency.’ Their enemy: the adversarial approach to exhibiting and selling art. Unfortunately, the fair closed its doors 20 minutes after we arrived, but what we did see was interesting to say the least– a lot more experimental art at this fair than the others we had visited. My ‘best in show’ had to have been Kota Ezawa’s illuminated photo boxes. And while we were leaving, we had the chance to quickly peruse a little pop-up shop from Cerealart, which had some great design pieces for sale like the Yoshitomo Nara Clock we know and love. Check out photos from our brief visit to NADA after the jump…

READ MORE…

Fair stop 2 of 3 in our art-packed day was to Photo Miami, and I have to say we were thoroughly impressed with the majority of the 43 exhibitors at the show. The overall theme to the fair was international media-based art, a mix of cultural, pop, natural, and other compelling photography. Josh and I even got photogenic with Patterson Beckwith, who was practicing a very interesting photo methodology where he took two seperate photos of us and exposed them on one single polaroid sheet in about 20 seconds (see his portrait studio online to see examples of the work). It’s a pretty classic photo that is sure to grace the office wall when we get home. While our snap-shot photo quality is nothing in comparison to the extreme talent we saw this afternoon (taking photos of photos is a little weird anyways), we hope you enjoy our Photo Miami favorites after the jump…

READ MORE…

Today was an action packed day of art exhibition viewing for Josh and I, as our Art Basel adventure continued. Our first stop was to Pulse Miami in the Wynwood District, which can be best be described as a small and manageable high end fair– Pulse showed the works of 52 exhibitors, mixing the works of both young and established collectors in an impressive and diverse combination of mediums. This was one of our favorite fairs, and an even better way to explain what we saw is to show you some photos of the work that really caught our eye, check them out after the jump…

READ MORE…