Connoisseurs of Street: Spring/Break Art Show LA
Marina's curation added a female gaze, which pierced the veil of what is usually defined as a male-centric and masculine space to reclaim street culture and bring focus to the emotion, creativity, and radicality of Lee and Pablo's work.
The two artists, who value the process above all else, draw on memories and images of the past to guide subject matter, but ultimately leave themselves free to channel moments of divine inspiration and artistic spontaneity. Their works aren't particularly masculine. Nor are they loud or boastful, rather personal and compelling— full of color, movement, life, and a rhythm that is authentically street and raw.
Photos of SPRING/BREAK Art Show LA 2023 by Samuel Morgan Photography.
In Connoisseurs of Street for Spring/Break, the two artists each embodied a wall and collaborated on a third wall to integrate their histories into one space. The wall is a seamless blend of their separate worlds, married through spray-painting, skateboarding, and urban exploration. There was also a video component that took us into the lives lived between the artists: across cities; across self-expressions of skating and graffiti; across personal painting practices.
Lee Smith
An ex-pro skater who took up painting during the pandemic, Lee Smith creates rich associations through his paintings based on photographs of friends, mostly from the skate world. Lee grew up in San Francisco during the height of the Mission School, a movement that emerged in the early ‘90s, which was strongly influenced by mural and graffiti art, comic and cartoon art, and folk art forms such as sign painting and hobo art. As a teenager, he discovered the famed plaza “The Embarcadero” and became infatuated with skateboarding and the group of kids that hung out there. While obsessed with drawing and graffiti and almost going to art school, he instead became a pro skateboarder at twenty-three and traveled the world.
At the beginning of 2021, he was hired to clean out the studio of artist Jean-Philippe Delhomme who left New York because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a form of gratitude, the artist left him art supplies, which ignited his personal painting practice. Marina associates his practice to what Baudelaire identified as the flâneur in his essay The Painter of Modern Life (1863) as the dilettante observer. Lee's immersion in the community he depicts in his paintings offers him key insight as to how to best capture the emotional layers of the neighborhood and its people. As much as he is part of the culture, he is also a herald of its true essence.
Pablo Power
Immersed in street culture from a young age, with his surroundings nurturing an interest in graffiti, Pablo Power gravitated toward graffiti writing as his form of creative expression. He recognized the city as a layered space, that was already painted, in a myriad of ways. His practice led to his photographic documentation of the people and places that live — largely unseen — between his creations. Pablo embeds himself in marginalized communities, lives with his subject matter and comes to a better understanding of their daily life. He compresses these periods of communion with others into large-scale murals that represent personal moments of reflection and fixation.
The collection paintings on display at Spring/Break, titled Compass Points/Forming Patterns, are both autobiographical and seemingly abstract. Photographs are layered with drawn and painted textures until all elements are virtually indistinguishable. The various turns, abrupt shifts, and bursts of color that are at the core of his work speak to the artist's vibration and psyche as well as his creative ethos. He believes that simple creative acts must impact humanity in a positive fashion.
