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.

Another product to earn kudos for what it’s not (i.e. fattening or habit forming), Clear Magazine has become “100% tree-free” and is now being printed with YUPO synthetic paper. The Michigan-based design and fashion publication released its “fame underground” issue, including features on designers Arne Quinze and Martin Mariela and artist Kenji Yanobe, at Art Basel Miami Beach last month. A recently posted video with Clear’s creative director Emin Kad explains that the paper is tear-proof and waterproof. Once purchased at fine newsstands worldwide, the issues can be put in recycling bins with other plastic items.

I’ve been a Parla collector and fan for years– since he came on to the mainstream art buying radar in a big way at the Art Basel Cityscapes exhibition in Miami a few years ago, his work (and the prices) have just skyrocketed, and for good reason. He’s one talented dude.

His latest show is at the Elms Lester Painting Rooms in London, and it once again raises the bar in a huge way. More detail, more pieces, more powerful images, large scale canvases, and a world view from his travels he didn’t have a few years ago. Words can not describe the work– so I won’t even really bother. On with the pictures.

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Over the years, millions of Football (in America, read: Soccer) fans around the world have worshiped at the altars of players like Beckham, Ronaldinho, and Zidane. AC Milan, Real Madrid, and Manchester United aren’t just teams — they’re religions. It’s this “sacralization” of sport that served as the inspiration behind “Holygame” from our good friends, the talented Swiss Designers at +41. Their installation, a part of the Nike 1/1 project, made up of Football shoes laced to each other and surrounding a soccer ball comes off as a remarkable religious prayer monument of sorts that might even prompt those immersed in the fanaticism of the football cult to bow and pay homage to that sport which they hold most dear. If you’d like to kneel before the soccer gods, this monumental installation will next be on display during the Art Basel fair in Switzerland early this June.

Many museums serve to cover the evolution of a particular subject over a prolonged period of time. The TAG Heuer 360 Museum is unique in that it is a museum of time. The new institution, located on the ground floor of the TAG Heuer company headquarters in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, houses a rare collection of precision timepieces created by the world renowned watchmakers over the brand's 150 year history. The design of the exhibition was itself modeled to reflect “the intriguingly inaccessible space between the dial and crystal glass, where the hands of time are turned by an inexplicable force from within. This spatial layer, steeped in both mystery and science, is architecturally articulated by the 3 major elements that together define the museum.” The museum's design, produced courtesy of “ducks Sceno”, and with the help of CARBONDALE and TAG Heur, presents visitors with an ultra-artistic panoramic view that certainly makes for jaw dropping scenery.

If you consider yourself a graphic designer, you’ve probably heard of Joshua Davis. As one of the first adopters of Flash, a significant new media artist, an author, and one of the design world's weightiest members, Joshua Davis is a name that rolls off many tongues during discussions regarding progression, experimentation, and development. A pioneer in the word's most technological sense, Joshua has never been one to find a niche and stick with it, instead choosing to find what's next — or in what's often his case, to create it. We chatted with Joshua about things like Praystation, philosophy, and his plans for the future, and wound up feeling a little bit like we do when we look at one of his mathematically composed graphics. In other words: utterly enthralled.

Joshspear.com: For our readers who aren't as familiar with your background, can you give us a brief rundown of your life up until today?

Joshua Davis: My name is Joshua Davis, born 1971 in San Diego, California, moved to Littleton, Colorado where I pretty much grew up. I had always been interested in art and in high school I entered a statewide competition and took second place in the state for painting. After spending ‘89, ‘90 in Huntington Beach, California skateboarding and ‘91, ‘92 moving back to Colorado living in Frisco to do some snowboarding, I moved to New York in November 1992 and eventually attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. At Pratt I worked on Design and Illustration and through fellow classmates got into working on the web in 1995 (Netscape 1.1). When Netscape 3 was released (at the end of 1996) I had a moment of clarity to use technology and the web to create my work. 13 years later I run Joshua Davis Studios where I use design and technology to create work for corporate clients, private collectors, galleries, museums, and personal exploration.

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Something about Art Basel must have left our pals at The Love Movement feeling extra goobery, because the crew of L.A. based artists have put together another super nice holiday giveaway to say thanks for the past year. Included in the loot are hand screenprints, TLM tee shirts, Yo! What Happened to Peace? books, and even a few art pieces from their past gallery shows. All you have to do to get in on the love is watch this video to figure out want you want the most, then shoot an email here with your address, a list of your top three choices, and something nice you did this year. TLM will do what they can to get as many goodies out there as possible, but I’m assuming your odds are higher if you hit them up soon, so get moving!

A few artists jumped out at me this weekend at Art Basel down in Miami — one of them I had to mention was Atsushi Kaga. Born in Japan, and schooled at the National College of Art in Dublin (weird, right?), Kaga’s work is devilishly intriguing. He had about 15 or 20 pieces, represented by Mother’s Tankstation (a small Irish gallery) available for sale — and into the third day as I was deliberating buying one, a collector-like looking woman walked in and bought the entire show of oil and acrylics with the snap of her fingers, as well as a few drawings. I’d keep your eyes peeled for more of Kaga’s work in the near future; my guess is he’s going to come onto the scene in a big way, and very soon. One more picture after the jump…

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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…

Josh and I first saw Sarah Pickering’s explosive photography at Scope Miami during Art Basel last year, and I was excited to see her featured in the current pHytonics issue. It’s undeniably the pyro in me that’s drawn to Sarah’s explosion photos– haven’t been able to get one this big out of my gas grill quite yet though. Interestingly, Sarah is no pyrotechnic (because you’d think that would be half the fun), but rather just follows police and military personnel into the boonies in England to photograph their explosives tests. Sarah is represented by renowned photography gallery Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York, and just recently held a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Anyone have a chance to see that show?

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.

This isn’t a post about sneakers, sorry; although Keith Peters did work as a Nike executive for 17 years, where he founded nike.com. Now residing in Jackson Hole, WY, where he runs his own communications company, Keith woke up in the middle of the night one night bothered about Global Warming and specifically his family’s contribution to the problem. It was at that point he decided to start the Carbon Neutral Journal– a weblog documenting his family’s efforts to become carbon-neutral. It is great to see people begin to realize that the first step toward fighting Global Warming is to make the necessary adjustments in their own lives. Keith has taken this important step one notch further, and is educating Carbon Neutral Journal readers through his own experience and is linking them into some great resources in the process; for instance, this simple carbon calculator that lets you determine your individual (or family’s) carbon impact. With a baseline from which to work, you can begin to erase your carbon footprint– aggregated change on the micro level leads to positive change on the macro level.

I’m still buzzing about my recent art purchase– a gorgeous Jose Parla watercolor I fell in love with at the Cityscapes exhibit we covered during Art Basel in Miami (recap here). I almost forgot to mention I picked up a copy of his bad-ass coffee table book also entitled Cityscapes. If you have any doubt about the talent of Parla, pick this one up. More than 150 pages of paintings and photography, gorgeously bound book, etc. The paintings really feel like they’re popping off the pages, the textures are incredible. Photographs by David Perez Shadi, Stefan Ruis, Davi Russo and Essays by Manon Slome and Michael Betancourt. $38 from Spoonfed, currently Parla’s exclusive partner.

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.

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…

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