Art on Bikes: Bike Polo Wheel Covers

Hardcourt bike polo is the urban version of the "Sport of Kings" (otherwise known as just "polo"). But horses are expensive! And they poop too. Hence, bike polo: the punk rock version of the royal pastime.

Polo players love to travel and play in other cities.

Bike polo is also a little bit like hockey. There are nets for goals, the plays are very hockey-esque, and it's a contact sport, meaning that polo equipment needs to be able to take a beating. Just as the players will suit up in helmets, gloves, knee pads and shin guards, the polo bikes also need a bit of protection. 

Wait, what's that? You thought this was an art blog? Yeah, yeah, I'm getting there. So check it out: Polo players put these covers on their wheels to protect their spokes from getting hit, and prevent some not-so-cool tangling from going on. Here's where the art comes in - bike polo evolved as a DIY sport, and wheel covers quickly became a prime canvas for personalizing each steed.

At first players were making wheel covers out of cardboard, but thosequickly fell apart. The standard now is coroplast, or corrugated plastic - the same stuff you see printed on to make cigarette and beer ads at markets.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE 
This hand-painted wheel cover was a Santa Cruz tournament prize.

Players use paint, markers and stickers to personalize their covers. Some are completely original, others pay homage to pop culture or subculture imagery. Some players put their team logo on their wheels as a way of both unifying the team and making it easy to tell if the bike on your right is manned by friend or foe. Wheel covers are often coveted prizes at tournaments. with unique art designed especially for the event emblazoned across them, they communicate that a player came, saw, conquered (or maybe just had the best crash of the weekend). 

Not all, but most polo players, put wheel covers on their bikes, but some of the best may end up as wall art. Each one has a story behind it, about the player, their team, their bike, and adventure. Polo players love to get creative, and wheel covers are one of the best ways they do it (aside from pulling some tricky bike maneuvers).

             

 See more wheel cover art and player profiles at www.goalhole.com/

Margaret Gallagher: Inspired in Los Angeles

 When Margaret Gallagher made the move from rural Canby, Oregon to the concree jungle that is Los Angeles, she sought comfort in connecting with the city's own flora and fauna.

I met Margaret at Kaldi in Atwater Village on a rainy Wednesday morning. It would likely be the only rainy day in the month, a welcomed rarity. Margaret's aging steel Trek road bike is locked up to a meter outside; the raindrops make the pale blue frame shimmer brightly against the gray of the day.  Through the glass I can see her bright red hair crowning her small frame, blunted bangs framing her calm expression.

A recent graduate of Occidental, Margaret is embracing her metamorphosis from painstaking senior art student to semi-employed, fully-immersed artist. Year to date she has curated her first show, a bicycle art show that received exceptional response from local artists, another in an underground tunnel in Cypress Park, and had her illustrations hung from on the light posts on high traffic streets in Northeast L.A.
http://margaretgallagherart.com/

https://www.facebook.com/LA.SALT.CRAFT

Dialogue in Dirt: An interview with São Paolo street artist Alexandre Orion

It's been two decades since Alexandre Orion first took up graffiti in São Paolo. Today, he is one of a small handful of street artists embracing a non-damaging sustainable art form most commonly known as “reverse graffiti.” Orion considers himself less of an artist and more of an activist, using his project, Ossario, to stimulate the dialogue on the effects of pollution on the human population. His compositions are not done with paint, but rather by wiping away soot to create relief images; as well as by reusing collected soot to paint on other surfaces. His main tools are rags and water. 

Since Ossario broke ground, Orion has used the walls of a busy metropolitan tunnel in his hometown with a series of striking, ghostly skulls that peer out into the darkness at passing drivers. Since then he has expanded his intervention pieces to some other the world's most populous cities, including Mexico City and Rio de Janiero, where a spine painted from soot stands 28 meters high on an industrial exhaust pipe. 

What is your process and what are your tools?

My process is completely free and my tools are whatever enables me to conceive an idea. Ideas have to come before style or technique. I have done a series using reverse graffiti as technique, but my work is always a combination of processes. What I am interested in is not the aesthetics of my works, but how they might set off processes in people's minds.

What methods do you use to create your images?

Just rags and my fingers. My skulls are hand drawn, one by one. The first intervention I got recorded on video was 300 meters long with over 3,500 skulls by the time the city came along to wipe it off.

"Making an intervention that has a social impact is hard, because it depends solely on artistic creation, on the idea and the force a work exerts over the place where it is produced."

How do you collect soot to be reused for paint?

I washed out rags used during the selective cleaning interventions, then waited for decanting and evaporating until only the soot was left, which I made into paint that looks like watercolor, but much more rustic.

Is Miley making art?

Art and sex are fairly familiar bedfellows, so much so that the line between the two tends to get quite blurry at times. So much so that sometimes it's hard to even tell whether some things are artistically provocative or blatantly exploitative. 

As I write these words the eyes of the world are focused on two women, each artists in their own right. Miley Cyrus stole the show at the MTV Video Music Awards, landed a ridiculous cover on Rolling Stone and is ostensibly the next in a line of crash-and-burn young female pop stars. Sinead O'Connor will forever hold a place in pop culture history for going against the status quo and checking out of the sex-and-money ruse of the music industry, among other things. Today, as that issue of Rolling Stone with Cyrus on the cover, looking all kinds of trashy and licking her shoulder, is flying off the news stands, O'Connor's website has broken under the weight of traffic pouring in to read her open letter to the young pop star.

Cyrus noted O'Connor as an inspiration, and even goes so far to assert that her debased performance in her latest music video for "Wrecking Ball" borrows from O'Connor's "Nothing Compares."

O'Connor appeals that Little Miss Montana has musical talent that will shine without the self-exploitation, but no one is pretending that racy performances aren't part of the pop star game, least of all Cyrus herself. While Miley may be calling the shots, some would dispute her motives. 

When is a creative work art and when is it entertainment? No doubt they can be in one the same, but is this always the case? Certainly some art is made to evoke strong reactions--Miley's performance at the VMA's included. There is something to be said for ruffling feathers, but could her racy performance be a legitimate act of pushing the envelope, or challenging the staus quo?

Miley seems to think so. "No one is talking about the man behind the ass," Cyrus tells Rolling Stone reporter Josh Ellis. "Obviously there's a double standard." The flood of complaints to the FCC following her performance only serve to confirm her argument, in which Miley is characterized as "slut," "whore," and "hooker."

Was it tasteful? Well, no, but that's hardly the overarching objective of art. Likewise embracing the lost art of open letters, Amanda Palmer suggests that art has a higher purpose than entertainment, and all the attention that Miley and her tongue have gotten since the VMA's speak to a social issue. 

"It's a Chinese finger trap that reflects the basic problems of our women-times: we're either scolded for looking sexy or we're scolded for not playing the game," she writes in her letter addressing O'Connor.

Does art bear the burden of social responsibility?

After the VMAs, Pharrell told Cyrus: “You are not a train wreck. You’re the train pulling everyone else along.” Miley surely didn't invent twerking, but she sure did bring the party to the public eye. O'Connor might abhor Cyrus' behavior while Palmer champions it, but it is Miley that is fueling their feelings. Twerk on, Miley.