I've written on Quelly several times already but really kept things professional in my take. Those posts have been dry and quite bland in their art historical skirting around my fandom.
First & foremost I've had a big art boner for the art stylings of the artist working under the moniker 'Quel Beast' since I started noticing them last year. There is something alive, graceful yet quite earnestly snarky in each of his works.
Fontography, Typesetting & Graf Tags are a personal visual fetish of mine, so it takes some very correct line work to grab my attention. The smooth contrast of the stenciled script provides a tight contrast with the hand written elements in his liberated postal sticker tags.
I could gush for hours about his line work & crap like that but the art is best enjoyed in it's native street setting. Walk through WIlliamsburg & Lower NYC (that's below 14th nubs) and you'll get peeks of the beast in the most random spots.
If you want to check out where his art is headed it should be interesting what he's made of the King's County Space.
So maybe so you tonight in East Williamsburg?
Heads up, L train is not running from Manhattan so it's the JMZ or just walk over.
Quel Beast: Street Art, Hip Hop, and Cross-Undressing
Quel Beast compares art to music, harshly. Placed side by side, art gets its ass kicked. “Art isn’t good enough,” he says, with reverence for music’s power to evoke feeling, stir memory and stir senses. People quickly filter out tags and stickers as visual noise, he points out, adding, “You don’t have a personal experience with someone’s name, the way you can with music.”
“I hate art. Art sucks,” Quel Beast declares, and we laugh. He’s describing his exasperation with the impossibility of art to realize his ideal of it.
He designed the portrait series as his inquiry into the source of our judgments. Where do conclusions come from, for instance, about a two-dimensional woman who may be posturing instead of pouting but in other ways remains unknowable? “Why is it that just because you put your body into certain positions, people will assume anything about you, your identity or your sexuality?,” Quel Beast asks, without knowing the answer.
Quel Beast, “Back That A$$ Up”, October 16, 10 PM, Kings County, 286 Siegel Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206.
Robin Grearson is an independent writer and essayist living in New York. She has written for The New York Times.
Quel Beast: www.quelbeast.com, facebook.com/quelbeastart
Tags: Brooklyn Street Art > Chelsea > Jaime Rojo > Kings County Bar > Manhattan > NYC > Quel Beast > Robin Grearson > Steven P. Harrington
Brooklyn Street Art
Read more at www.brooklynstreetart.com
