Featured Artist: SARAH LAWS "FUNCUPCAKE":: Boston

Sarah Laws "Funcupcake" is an artist/designer originally from the West coast (Oregon & California) now living in a small New England Coastal town just minutes North of Boston, via New York City. She graduated with a degree in sculpture from Portland State University and studied Accessory Design in New York City. Her subjects include naive subject matter, and often reference personal childhood memories and dream-like settings. She creates intricate line drawings, paper-cuts, paintings and fabric sculptures with a handmade quality always represented. She is deeply inspired by the season changes, animals and nature, especially the oceans and forests, folk art, celebrations and domestic life.

Links:// www.funcupcake.com // online shop: www.funcupcake.etsy.com

Featured Artist: SHERM:: Los Angeles

Sherm is a graffiti artist, designer and visual artist from Los Angeles. While her roots are in graffiti, she has expanded her skills over the years into art, graphic and web design. Her artistic style is bold and organic and her subject matter is a combination of cute animals, feminine beauty, personal life experience, social commentary and general observation.

Links:// www.shermgrafik.com

Featured Artist: DEME5:: Boston

Mention the word aerosol in Boston and his name is bound to pop up. Rich Gomez a.k.a. DEME5 the Dominican born artist first realized his potential at an early age. Deme drew inspiration from graffiti books and Boston's environments. With a keen sense of design and a vision to transform any surface put before him, his talent has not gone unrecognized. He has received commissions from some of Boston's most reputable businesses. It is said that "to whom much is given, much is required". Realizing this, Deme decided to share his talent and knowledge by becoming a painting instructor/mentor at Artist for Humanity, a local nonprofit for inner city youth. Deme now works as a self-employed artist and is exploring all avenues of creativity. Although aerosol is his primary medium, he has recently begun to incorporate new materials and methods to execute his ideas. Not one to brag, he is well known for his humility. His future goals include exhibiting at contemporary institutions, collaborating with likeminded artsts, and sharing his work with the people of Boston and the world.

See more or inquire about a piece at deme5.com

Featured Artist: LICHIBAN:: Brooklyn, NY

Lichiban is a Brooklyn-based self-taught visual artist, illustrator, curator, and full time creative hustler. She was born in a border town in Hungary and from early on she acquired a fascination with borders, limits and ambiguous dividing lines; her experiences on the margins of cities, countries and subcultures eventually formed into a semi-consistent life philosophy, which continues to inspire her creative development.Her images draw inspirations from a wide range of extraordinary life experiences and impressions, such as her childhood memories of Eastern-European folktales and animations, her studies in Sufism and her travels to war-torn countries (Bosnia, Kashmir, Eastern Turkey), her volunteer work with refugees and trauma victims and from meeting exceptional people. Her experiences led her to a deep appreciation for people and their stories, which expresses itself best in her love for faces.

Her work draws on elements of tribal & religious art, comics & animations, symbolism, surrealism, erotic and fantasy illustration. Her passion for music, erotica and the mystical sciences reflects vividly in her most recent work. Most recently, she has been working on developing a number of feline superheroes to visually narrate her mystical mythology. Their first representations were revealed at her recent art show, THE SECRET LIVES OF SAMURAIS FROM THE LAND OF ETERNAL LOVE, which was about the heart chakra symbolically represented by my feline samurai, Lotusheart.

She has exhibited her work in New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and in Wilmington and has been leaving her trace around at various live art events in New York City. She has been featured in CLAM Magazine, TRACE Magazine blog, Limite Magazine, PEP! Magazine blog, Leisure LAB, and Dope Swan among others

LOTUSHEART (ALTEREGO) ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a spiritual animal with a human imagination. A embodied light-being journeying to the original source by way of creating realities through colors and images. Reality and time are mental concepts we are ready to experience-art is a way of becoming the master of one's universe. My creativity is a divine gift given to every single child, and my life as an artist is the gradual unfolding of that gift. My works are intended to be spirit-transformers or gateways to a vibration field I am here to manifest. My felines represent different evolutionary stages on the way to the ever-flowing nectar of immortality. My art is a way of riding the inner tiger. Freedom is in the heart of the beholder.

Links:// www.lichiban.net // lichiban.blogspot.com // www.myspace.com/lichiban // www.twitter.com/lichiban

Featured Artist: WERC:: Los Angeles

My work comes from two places, border culture because I was born in Cd Juarez and grew up in El Paso Texas; and graffiti, my urban teacher, because the streets were my training ground. My passion for letters has provoked new inspirations in my artist life. Although graff is the most profound element of myself as an artist , it is separate from my art practice, where I am challenged by the contemporary approaches of all mediums in art. Inspirations come from logos, symbolism, architecture, urbanization, the humor and nostalgia in specific immigrant cultures because I see the beauty in their creative micro-economies that develop sustainability and affordability; which lead to creations of participatory and collective art projects with intentions of dissolving all borders and deceptive forms of separation. Hunting, gathering and investigating these themes; I paint, collage, install, sculpt and use video to translate my concepts into experiences .

Werc is also one of the creative visions behind La Entrada Project (www.laentradaproject.com)- a collaborative art project of public art in personal spaces infused as murals and art workshops throughout the new landscape rising in San Diego, California. The project actively cultivates culture in the community and is a reflection of social change.

Links:// www.crolvswerc.com // www.laentradaproject.com //

La Entrada Project - Wall3 from LaEntradaProject on Vimeo.

Keep posted for more ARTIST FEATURES!...

Featured Artists/Curators: Marka27 & NineRevolutions

Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez

Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez is a prolific graffiti writer/artist/designer who is never confined to one medium. His graffiti has been seen in high profile galleries throughout the east and west coast and has shown along side artist such as Futura and Sam Flores. His street murals/ graffiti have been published in several life style magazines and books, including: Graffit Planet, Burning New York, and Graffiti L.A.. Marka27 made his mark with his original “Audio Canvas” paintings with built in speakers, also his large speaker installations with legendary hiphop icons painted on the speaker boxes. Marka27 also stays close to his graffiti roots and for over 15 yrs still continues to paint street murals through out the U.S.

Marka27 is also the creator of the "MINIGODS" Givers. Of. Divine. Sound, a line of designer vinyl toys with speakers that have become a great success among toy collectors, art collectors, and music lovers. His latest collaborations have been with "Bic Plastics" a toy company from Hong Kong/ China. Together BicPlastics and Marka27have designed Killa Instinct a new graffiti based urban vinyl figure along with a blind box toy series "BICS" which is in the works.

Links: // www.marka27.com // www.minigods.com // www.twitter.com/fearnoart3 //

NineRevolutions

As an art student and then as a professional artist, I have come to realize that art is more than translucent interfaces, more than a curated statement on a sterile wall, and certainly more than the surface images that we are constantly force fed. Creativity needs to break down the boundaries set up by morality, the elitist definition of aesthetics and it must indulge in its ability to speak, record and portray the voice of humanity. It almost seems banal to restrict such language to condensed distraction for society. Society will always rejuvenate itself; rules will always meander through loopholes and with that inevitable change, art will record and set the new standards.

Artwork by Ninerevolutions: The human character needs to learn to be more pliable if it wants to survive. However, survival alone is a mundane existence; we are propelled by the sensual, unreachable feat of immortality. With that urge to overcome death, we create, we build and we redesign until there is nothing left to take away. I respect my identity because it is ever changing. My work evokes my experience, each panel, each stroke, colour and line tells a story, a nuance, a history true to my recollections but open to interpretation. I trust the fluidity of gender, the common ground in biology, the investigative nature of the mind and more importantly art that taints all branches of the population.