Mike Weston, Otis Frizzell: We Are Weston Frizzel

PRESS RELEASE

Mike Weston and Otis Frizzell

We Are Weston Frizzell

01.08.09 – 26.08.09

preview: Friday 31 july 5.30 – 7.30pm onwards

Art and branding collide at Weston Frizzell’s upcoming exhibition of paintings and prints. We Are: Weston Frizzell is opening at Toi O Tahuna fine art gallery, Church lane, Queenstown. The exhibition runs 1-26 August.

We Are represents the next level of the Weston Frizzell’s exploration of the iconography of NZ fine art and popular culture by applying a combination of approaches, styles and ideas. Their painted works combine lumpy recycled paint, industrial surfaces, spray can enamel and cutting edge automotive paint technology. Subversive commercialism and the outright audacity of their appropriated subject matter shows the singular fearlessness that the Weston Frizzell brand has come to signify.

Weston Frizzell is the collaborative identity of artists Otis Frizzell and Mike Weston. In 9 years of working together, Otis Frizzell and Mike Weston’s creative partnership has evolved from celebrity and grafiti artist and his art dealer into a full-blown art collaboration. Both artists have their roots deep in NZ's counterculture. The range of skills and influences that they share is diverse and eclectic.

Described by Art News New Zealand as "a high performance art parnership", their Andy Warhol influenced production line methods has taken them from the street art and pop culture melting pot of Auckland’s Karangahape Rd to the fine art world. Their output draws heavily on appropriated imagery, style and content. Presented with satiric and ironic subtext, it often challenges notions of authorship and originality .

Their paintings are carefully planned and produced. The works showcase a combination of savvy design, a mean eye for art history and media and demonstrated spray paint and brush techniques. Combining innovative and complex techniques, they produce clever and accessible works of art. This equal partnership acknowledges the contribution of ideas, craft, celebrity, management, and labour in the production and marketing of works. The combined skills of the two artists and their diversity of influences express an aesthetic that is positioned at the very high end of the low brow.

We are will run from 1 August until 26 August 2009 with an opening on the evening on Friday 31 August, 5.30pm - 7.30pm.

ENDS

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