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Posts Tagged ‘tattoo’

Inspiration from a “Rat Hole”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 28, 2024| 4 Comments »

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
“Chicago’s ‘Rat Hole’ has become an unofficial city landmark as hundreds have flocked to pay tribute to the unidentified rodent imprint,” Hyperallergic reports.

Never underestimate the capacity of humans for fun and creativity. And be glad that social media amplifies good things, not just bad.

Rhea Nayyar writes at Hyperallergic, “In less than two whole weeks, the internet has turned a mildly interesting pavement impression on a residential sidewalk slab in Chicago into a viral local tourism site and a wellspring of artistic inspiration.

“The Chicago Rat Hole is exactly what it’s named — an imprint of a rat (or perhaps a squirrel) that fell with some force on a sidewalk panel that hadn’t fully dried yet. Some locals say it’s been there for over 20 years, but all it took was one post on X [site formerly known as Twitter] to turn the Rat Hole into something just short of a national landmark.

There is so much whimsy in going about your daily life here! That’s what I love about the Rat Hole the most

“Since artist and comedian Winslow Dumaine tweeted about his pilgrimage to the Rat Hole [January 2024] hundreds of people have flocked to the city’s Roscoe Village neighborhood to pay tribute to the unidentified rodent and its signature. What began as an innocent meme crept slowly into a small monument as people started leaving loose change and cigarettes and pouring one out over the hole, and then spiraled into something major. Offerings went from coins and smokes to flowers, cards, jewelry, hats, trinkets, toys, posters, and personalized artwork as the site drew more attention on TikTok and X.

“But it didn’t stop there. People built a community around the Rat Hole. Some groups have congregated and started drinking and partying together at the site, one couple got engaged in front of it, and another held a gay wedding there, complete with a balloon arch and everything. …

“Chicago-based artist and Etsy seller Margot la Rue was quick to cement the Rat Hole into the city’s iconography by replacing the stars of the official flag with silhouettes of the imprint and adding it to the label of the locally famous Jeppson’s Malört liquor bottle motif for iron-on patches. La Rue told Hyperallergic that she visited the Hole and chatted with a neighbor who was sitting on her porch at the time.

“ ‘She said over the weekend there was a line down the block to see the rat hole,’ La Rue recounted. … ‘It is very Chicago,’ the artist continued. ‘The city is simultaneously shiny and gritty — turning a rat shape in a sidewalk into a cultural landmark is very on brand.’ …

“Anthony Hall, one half of the Chicago-based design duo Harebrained, shared that people can get their very own Rat Hole t-shirt now. … Nick, a tattoo artist who goes by Inked Skunk on social media, recently moved to Chicago from New England and was really excited by the buzz around the Rat Hole. Enamored by the culture, Nick is offering Rat Hole-inspired tattoos. … ‘Since moving here, I’ve picked up such a different energy from the people and the area itself. There is so much whimsy in going about your daily life here! That’s what I love about the Rat Hole the most — it’s just a silly reminder that life doesn’t have to be so serious.’ …

“A less permanent option for Rat Hole fans who happen to be baddies is local nail technician Jena’s (@nailswithonen) artistic nail set tribute to the landmark. …

“Perhaps the most impressive ode to the Rat Hole is its commemorative plaque commissioned by Riot Fest, Chicago’s annual punk rock music festival. … The plaque has been converted into a t-shirt as well with all proceeds directed toward benefiting the city’s Douglass Park neighborhood and surrounding community via the Riot Fest Foundation. …

“But considering that the Rat Hole sits on a residential street, the loitering, littering, and loud noises have become a nuisance for the locals. One neighbor even took to Reddit to bullet-point out how the Rat Hole frenzy has impacted their life. … To anyone looking to make a pilgrimage to the Rat Hole as its future remains unclear, remember to be respectful of the neighborhood and keep the area clean.”

More at Hyperallergic, here.

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Inuits Reclaim Their Tattoos

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on March 3, 2024| 7 Comments »

Photo: Adeline Heymann/One Ocean Expeditions.
Candice Pedersen, a guide for One Ocean Expeditions in the Arctic, tells passengers that Inuit women feel empowered reclaiming traditional tattoos for themselves.

I love the radio show called The World because of the international focus. It always has a deeper take on mainstream media stories, and you can hear music you’re unlikely to be exposed to anywhere else. Recently, Joshua Coelda, Sejersdal Dreiager, and Shirsha Chakraborty reported about a tradition that is coming back from the brink: Inuit tattoo art.

“Najannguac Dalgård Christensen, 35, pulled back her sleeve on one forearm to reveal a pair of tattoos shaped like train tracks across her wrists. …

“These are traditional Inuit tattoo patterns that speak to her Indigenous Inuit heritage. The markings, she said, represent Sila, a word that carries many meanings, including ‘breath,’ ‘sky,’ ‘spirit’ and ‘universe.’

“To Christensen, who got the tattoo several years ago, it also means ‘the Greenlandic belief that we should be aware of who we are and what we can be, and that is attached to each other.’

“In precolonial times, Inuit women of Greenland, and across much of the Arctic, would have tattoos on both their bodies and faces, holding important pre-Christian spiritual meaning. Today, some Greenlandic Inuit like Christensen are reclaiming their identity through this long-lost art. 

“She said that she didn’t always embrace her Greenlander identity — because it is often associated with negative stereotypes about the Inuit diaspora living in Denmark, who colonized the North American island three centuries ago.  

“ ‘I felt empowered by getting the tattoos because it was like there was some kind of relief that I didn’t have to be embarrassed about being a Greenlander anymore,’ Christensen said. …

“The custom itself is far from new, but tattoos were some of the first traditions to be discouraged when Danish-Norwegian missionaries started colonizing the island at the beginning of the 18th century. The missionaries found tattooing incompatible with Christian faith, [Randi Sørensen Johansen, intangible cultural heritage curator at the Greenland National Museum and Archives] said. …

“As the custom disappeared, so did much of the knowledge about the tattoos’ meaning. ‘We didn’t have that tradition of writing down,’ Johansen said — Inuit passed knowledge through oral storytelling. …

“Inuit would use amulets to protect them from ‘unwelcome spirits,’ but also to help certain attributes or ensure a successful childbirth, among other things. It is likely, Johansen said, that Inuit tattoos were seen as a kind of amulet, giving strength, help or protection to the women or — in rarer cases — men who had gotten them.

“The tattoos were most often made as linear patterns across the brow and vertical lines on the chin made by using both a puncture or dot technique and a sewing technique. The latter technique consisted of pulling sinew dipped in soot under the skin with a needle made of animal bone, curator Johansen said.

“Maya Sialuk Jacobsen is one of about a dozen Inuit tattoo artists across the globe reviving this traditional art. … It was she who created Christensen’s tattoos. For over six years, she’s been helping Inuit like Christensen who live in Denmark connect with their culture through ink. Like Christensen, she is of both Danish and Greenlandic Inuit descent — a group she describes as an emerging ‘third culture’ in the Scandinavian country.

“The community is fairly small in Denmark and not well-defined demographically. According to StatBank Greenland, there are a little under 17,000 people born in Greenland currently living in Denmark. But community leaders, including from the Greenlandic House of Aalborg, aren’t even sure about the exact number of Inuit in Denmark. The number of self-identifying Inuit could be even higher, due to the presence of third-culture community members, who are partially Inuit. …

“Sialuk Jacobsen said, ‘It’s basically identity work all the time.’  Many come to her with a feeling of sadness, in search of a sense of belonging, she said. ‘They need to talk about these things, and to learn about the culture, they just want to learn.’ …

“While Sialuk Jacobsen said she uses inks and needles approved for tattooing on clients in Denmark, her research into the traditional techniques has included experimental tattooing on herself, and using her own right leg as her test area to reconstruct authentic methods of inking up.

“But in Denmark, finger, hand and face tattoos are prohibited (though it’s not illegal in Greenland). So, Sialuk Jacobsen is limited to tattooing the rest of the body. …

“The legacies of colonialism hang heavy over the community living in Denmark. Greenlanders are overrepresented among Denmark’s homeless population — accounting for 7% of people experiencing homelessness, according to VIVE.

“In recent years, Denmark’s colonial past came under public scrutiny.  For her master’s degree, Christensen looked into a form of ‘modern boarding schools.’ She found that Inuit children in Denmark are more likely than Danish children to be taken away from their families and placed in foster homes, which are almost always Danish families. 

“ ‘They learn to speak Danish, and there isn’t any focus on the Greenlandic language, so they lose their Greenlandic language. And when the parents only speak Greenlandic, they can’t talk to each other without an interpreter.’

“Christensen, who has become an activist through her research, believes the government should make it at least mandatory for Inuit children living in foster care to have lessons on Greenlandic.”

More at PRI’s The World, here, and CNN, here.

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Pirate Artist

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 6, 2022| 7 Comments »

Photo: Art in America.
Dick Riley’s approach to art stirs things up.

The New York Times calls this anti-plastic missionary a “pirate artist.” Melena Ryzik‘s article explains how he got that moniker.

“The artist Duke Riley isn’t exactly sure why he had the idea to turn a plastic tampon applicator into a fishing lure, but he knows one thing for certain: It works.

“He put it to the test one summer day on a buddy’s boat in Block Island Sound, and, with his pastel bait bouncing along the ocean floor, pulled up a sizable fluke. It was a keeper — ‘I definitely ate it,’ he said.

“The applicator tube had first washed up ashore, part of the many tons of seaborne trash that Riley, a Brooklyn artist known to scavenge New York’s waterways for materials and inspiration, has collected over the years. Putting this spent plastic product to use as fish food — that was some D.I.Y. upcycling. Putting it into the Brooklyn Museum of Art: that is Riley’s wild and singular artistic ingenuity.

“There’s a film of the fishing endeavor, done in the style of a crusty YouTube tutorial. The lures — displayed on pegboard, as in a real bait shop — join other plastic detritus that Riley has repurposed, like straws, dental floss picks and vape pens, in ‘DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash,‘ an exhibition [that opened in June] at the Brooklyn Museum. Across multiple rooms and settings, it confronts the calamitous environmental impact of the plastics industry and the ways in which unchecked consumption, for personal convenience, has polluted waterways.

“Its centerpiece is more than 200 works of painstakingly hand-drawn scrimshaw that Riley has spent three years making. Instead of the whale teeth and walrus tusks that 19th-century sailors once etched, he uses a contemporary, dispiritingly abundant, analog: discarded plastics. Lotion tubes, squirt bottles, brushes, a honey bear, solo flip-flops, a Wiffle ball and a legless lawn flamingo now stained bone-white, all provide the canvas for Riley’s patterned mariner drawings in India ink.

“As whalers often depicted the leaders and profiteers of their day, Riley portrays the C.E.O.s of chemical companies, plastic industry lobbyists and others he deems responsible for producing the devastating tonnages of single-use plastics that are engulfing our oceans and threatening our ecosystems. It’s a downer, but if you look closely there’s often a Riley twist of humor, like the seagull shown relieving itself on the head of a water bottle magnate.

“ ‘This is an artist who I always refer to as a modern-day pirate,’ said Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum. ‘He’s not just an aesthete pointing to something passively, he’s working to actively spur change — you have to be in it with an artist like Duke. He’s not going to hold back.’

“Calling out corporate titans and politicians — particularly when institutions like the Brooklyn Museum depend on them for donations and support — comes from a fearless ethic and ‘a wit that is hilarious and unforgiving.’ She added, ‘I always think of him as the George Carlin of the art world.’ …

“Best known for ‘Fly by Night,’ a 2016 performance in which 2,000 trained pigeons outfitted with LEDs lit up the New York sky, or for launching his own homemade Revolutionary War submarine into the path of the Queen Mary 2 cruise ship, Riley has mostly succeeded by navigating around the commercial New York art world, though he holds degrees from some of its prestigious feeder institutions (a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. in sculpture from Pratt Institute). …

“ ‘Duke is a natural,’ said Ernesto Pujol, an artist and former professor at Pratt who has mentored him. ‘A huge talent. … He had to fight his way for the art world to see him holistically — he is the kind of artist that is always more than you bargain for.’ …

“Riley works in many mediums: The Brooklyn exhibition includes films, decorative installations, mosaics and illustrations, like a vast map of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, encompassing its history from precolonial bounty to Dutch settlers through the polluted Superfund site that in 2007 tested positive for gonorrhea. …

“His mosaics offer one of the biggest wows of the show. Inspired by sailors’ valentines, a nautical souvenir traditionally made of shells, Riley’s are enormous and quite beautiful.

Only on close inspection do you notice that the perfect, shiny seashells are interlaid with a rainbow of bottle caps, cigar tips, bits of mechanical pencils, and bread bag clips, all harvested from New York streets and waterfronts. …

“[His studio is] a cleanish space, stacked with neatly bagged, color-coordinated trash. A trailer outside was filled with more refuse. Some of it came from Fishers Island, the exclusive enclave in Long Island Sound, where Riley had a residency in 2019, and where he met a woman whose full-time job is to rid its beaches, the summer home of families like the DuPonts, of plastic rubbish.

“ ‘The exhibition is so much about holding people accountable, and the little acts that people can take to solve this problem,’ Liz St. George, the show’s curator, said. That includes museum administrators; in the course of working with Riley, they changed cafeteria suppliers to minimize plastic, and reconfigured water fountains to accommodate reusable bottles. …

“He did the scrimshaw in solitude aboard his boat, now docked in Rhode Island. A Massachusetts native who worked on the fish docks and grew up visiting places like the New Bedford Whaling Museum, he has always been attracted to a New England nautical aesthetic. …

“This week, Riley is also debuting a mosaic in Boston’s central library. It is one of only a few pieces of contemporary art purchased for permanent installation in the landmark 1895 building, since a circa-1900s John Singer Sargent mural. Riley’s work is partly inspired by the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, an urban disaster caused when a storage tank exploded, releasing millions of gallons of the sticky stuff. It destroyed neighborhoods in the North End, a community of Italian immigrants. …

“For his core group of collaborators, no project is too brazen, or too labor-intensive. ‘We always pull it off,’ said Nicholas Schneider, a New York City firefighter and a longtime member of Riley’s crew. Through all the fun, ‘there is always a somber or very serious component that I think he’s always been the most focused on and proud of.’ “

More at the Times, here. See also Art in America, here.

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