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Streets: Swoon @ Nuart Aberdeen 6 Jun 2024 12:16 PM (10 months ago)

Nuart returns to Aberdeen this weekend with a full program of murals, conference talks and screenings and this provides a good opportunity to look back at the undoubted highlight of last year's event: Swoon's return to the streets for the first time since 2017. Following her retrospective at CIC Cincinnati, the Brooklyn-based artist, also known as Caledonia Curry, decided to shift focus to work on other pieces of her artistic puzzle, most notably the stop-motion animation Sibylant Sisters which is currently in production. But the draw of the streets and the opportunity put up work in the country from where her name derives was too great and Aberdeen was left with ten pieces of magic pasted around the city.

Caitlin

In the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, Swoon and a group of friends teamed up with New Orleans Airlift to try to help revive the city’s arts scene. Swoon envisioned a playable, musical installation which would fuse two of the areas greatest cultural assets: music and architecture. The current iteration of the project features over 16 buildings and structures which have stages on which musicians can perform but also instruments embedded within their walls to create sonic, musical architecture intended to foster wonder, beauty and experimentation.

This particular image was originally created for the gates of the Music Box Village and depicts the New Orleans-based sculptor and preserver Caitlin Ezell Waugh; she’s pulling on a cable that is connected first to a pulley and then to a slide trombone. Beneath her is a motif based on Lissajous Curves which are generated by oscilloscopes and provide a visual representation of sound. But, more than this, Caitlin is a testament to creative collaboration with Taylor Lee Taylor (who designed much of the instrumentation), Darryl Reeves (a local local blacksmith who led the rigging of the musical houses) and hundreds of other creatives like Waugh who contributed towards making the Music Box Village a reality.

Aba

Another portrait which grew out the Music Box is that of Aba Essel, better known as Baaba Blacksheep who previously performed with the New Orleans punk band Gland and is now the lead singer with Oakland’s very own M80. Swoon grew up as a teenager in Daytona Beach listening to a healthy diet of punk rock and music has been a constant presence throughout her career. 

Her first solo exhibition featured a soundscape and Japanther’s renegade, unpermitted performance out the back of a truck was a memorable feature of the opening of her landmarked 2005 show at Deitch Projects. In 2003, the Toyshop art collective, which she helped form, assembled a roving junk band which toured the streets of Manhattan entertaining bemused passers-by and she collaborated widely with Dark Dark Dark who became the effective house-band on the Swimming Cities rafts which sailed down Hudson River and across the Adriatic Sea. While waitressing in a New York diner, Swoon even featured in a music video for Thalia and a few years ago she gave us a peak into the music she listens to when working in the studio.

In this portrait, Aba plays a percussion set which is embedded in the Music Box Village and she is flanked by a scattering of hexagons whose patterns, such as that of an uncoiling fern in an ancient forest, were originally designed for tiles crafted at the Braddock Tile Project. 

Bethlehem Boys

In 2007, Swoon was invited to take part in Santa’s Ghetto, Banksy’s then annual ‘squat art concept store’, which that year was decamping to Bethlehem in the West Bank. In addition to the exhibition in a former chicken restaurant in Manger Square, many of the artists including Blu, Know Hope and Paul Insect painted on the Separation Wall, which the International Court of Justice states is a violation of international law. Swoon pasted up images of Alice The Lacemaker, Girl from Rangoon Province and, on one of the Israeli watchtowers, Zahra; beneath the latter was a quote from Starhawk’s Webs of Power and hand-sewn pockets in which others could leave their own messages.

While putting up these streets pieces, Swoon saw a group of young Palestinian boys from the Aida refugee camp playing in the shadow of the 8m high wall. Looking back, Swoon recalls that “This is one of those prints that marks the moment when I first knew that I would want to try to find tenderness in a medium as stark and unforgiving as carving a sheet of linoleum with a knife.” The prominence of the wall makes it an alienating and oppressive presence, but in this group portrait, Swoon has compassionately captured the innocence and humanity of those children despite their having been forced to grow up in such an environment.

Sasu and Kasei

Sasu is one half of the artistic duo HITOTZUKI whom Swoon first met and exhibited alongside at the Ill Communication II exhibition in Manchester back in 2004. The husband and wife team were part of the infamous Barnstormers collective, alongside the likes of José Parlá and Maya Hayek, and her delicate geometric designs often take inspiration from the bounty of nature. 

Aside from being an accomplished artist, Sasu is also a mother of two and this portrait captures her holding her eldest son Kasei after a bath. It is an activity which is at once both routine and unremarkable but also deeply devotional and ardently caring; this sense is emphasized in the piece in Aberdeen by the saintly viridian green which appears to almost glow against the soot-stained brick wall on which it is pasted. Hanging out late at night after the Ill Communication exhibition had opened, Swoon recalls a conversation between the two artists where Sasu attested to the importance of seeing from your heart because that’s your centre, rather than seeing from your head which looks down on the rest of yourself and believes itself to be separate. This feeling of assured wholeness permeates the portrait even as infant limbs sprawl out from the towel and she contends with the everyday challenges of motherhood.

Ten years on from the creation of the original image, this tender testament to maternal love was given a more humorous twist when Sasu recreated the image at Swoon’s Mirari Minima exhibition in Tokyo with a considerably more grown up Kasei!

Nicole 

The eponymous subject of this both meditative and joyful portrait is the writer and designer Nicole Fenton who, like many of her subjects, is also a personal friend of Swoon. The image captures her when she was almost full-term with her daughter and her fecundity is reflected in the abundance of surrounding marine life; spotted jellyfish, pipe organ coral, devil rays and sea ferns all provide a throne for the majestic figure. At its heart, Aberdeen is a maritime city and fittingly Nicole can be found a short distance from the city’s almost 900 year old docks. 

Nicole is the most recent in a series of works by Swoon which centre around pregnancy and motherhood. The first of these was Zahra, pregnant with her first child and possessing a sort of Artemisian inner strength and she-wolf protective instinct; Birth captures the moment of crowning and defies western art’s irrational and inexplicable taboo treatment of the subject; Dawn and Gemma is an intimate portrait of a mother breastfeeding her child and the softness of the embrace acted as a healing counterbalance for Swoon when confronting the hardship of her relationship with her own mother.

Walkie 

Late afternoon on 12th January 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti killing over 100,000 people and destroying more than 300,000 homes and buildings. Swoon and a team of likeminded artists, engineers and builders came together with a common belief that the creative process and the use of local skills, materials and techniques would help in a time of crisis. A long-term relationship was established with the village of Komye, situated 15 miles west of the epicenter, and the Konbit Shelter project was formed. It takes it name from a Haitian Creole word for a traditional form of cooperative, communal labor and over the last 14 years the partnership has built a community center and three single-family homes, each designed and adapted with feedback from the community. 

Walkie was a young boy from the village who often came to watch the construction of the super adobe-style community center and this is the first portrait that Swoon made after beginning work on the project. She went on to also create a portrait of Edline and since then local children have been able to attend the weekly Klub Obzevetwa which gives kids time to develop their creativity with the help of local teachers. Donations towards the ongoing running of the after-school club can be made via Swoon’s non-profit Heliotrope Foundation here.

Paulini and Rosemary

In 2012, Swoon visited the 160 Girls Project in Kenyan which seeks justice for the victims of sexual abuse and successfully sued the Kenyan National Police Force to compel them to enforce existing laws that would protect women and girls from rape. Under the leadership of Mercy Chidi Baidoo, the project has gone on to provide training to police departments across the country and runs the Tumaini safe house for girls in Kithoka where Paulini, on the left, and Rosemary, on the right, lived.

This particular piece shows traces many of Swoon’s artistic influences such as the college of children’s drawings connecting the two figures which is suggestive of the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Romare Bearden. Her predominant use of wheat pasting, which peels and degrades with time, embraces Gordon Matta-Clark’s thoughts on the transience of life and how some things are just not meant to last. But, more specifically with this piece, there is an awareness of the importance of site-specific context; Aberdeen is known as the Granite City, as a result of the high proportion of buildings which have been hewn from the rock retrieved from quarries dotted around the local area and the placement of this piece on these granite walls both embeds the work in the physical soul of the city and provides a contrast between the flat pastel shades of the work and the rough darkness of the stone. But, more than anything, Swoon is the heir to Käthe Kollwitz’s compassionate expressionism and this work is imbued with the German artist’s Goethean mantra that “Seed for sowing should not be milled”.

Monica

Swoon’s first portrait of the Oakland-based artist Monica Canilao dates back to 2010. The portrait is a whirlwind of tattered bedsheets and flowing lace; extraneous limbs and fly-away hair; feathers and flowers, all caught in the maelstrom. Throughout the portrait, Canilao's idiosyncratic sense of style is evident from the fox adorning her head and the bold, handmade jewellery she wears, to her tattoo of a dove shot through with arrows and misfit makeup which is perceptible even in monochrome.

Working in a broad range of mediums, Canilao’s work is a visual record of a living history. Her own experiences are intertwined with remnants of past lives through the use of found materials in her work and Swoon has brought this foundational aspect of Canilao’s work into the portrait by drawing her resting on a giant portrait of an ancestor.

Swoon has described Monica as equal parts muse and wifey and it’s a creative partnership which has spawned a diverse and enduring range of collaborations from creating works on the whitewashed walls of Djerba in Tunisia to the underwater Amniotic installation with Chandran Gallery at Miami Basel in 2014. They have exhibited together on a number of occasions including at Black Rat Projects in London in 2007 and at their joint Witch Wife show in San Fransisco almost a decade later. 

Moni and the Sphinx

In August 2016, Swoon returned to the subject of the women that she describes as her “most singular muse and collaborator”. This statuesque iteration of Canilao is rich with symbolism and creates what she describes as a “looping narrative about the instinctual nature of the psyche, growth, abundance, boundaries and protection.” When she was 17, Swoon spent a year in Prague as an exchange student sating her appetite for the work of Egon Schiele and the Medusa-esque sphinxes in this work reference the huge stone versions which guard the entrance to the National Library. Over recent years, Swoon has undertaken deep therapeutic work to confront her traumatic upbringing and family life; during this time she encountered a pair of owls while walking in the forest and the birds continued to appear symbolically throughout a given day. They appear in this portrait at the feet of Moni acting as a source of strength and courage.

Monica’s own expressiveness and creativity is celebrated in part through a series of soon-to-be hatching eggs, flowing rivers and flowering irises, all of which were drawn from imagination. But, more fundamentally, lines which correspond with the folds of her dress give the impression of her innate creativity flowing from her patiently drawn hands out into the world. 

Milton II (Diogenes)

This portrait of Swoon’s father Milton was created in the months following his passing in 2015, when she was trying to come to terms with her loss and grief. Milton had been addicted to heroine, but got clean when Swoon was four years old and supported her throughout her career. He is described as having never quite “got free of the tensions that bound him” and he is depicted here as an old man in his wilderness searching for what would come next. 

Hidden away where the paper has been pasted into the corner of a step is a ribbon inscribed with words which Swoon saw written on a picture on her father’s bookshelf “I have been where you are now, and you will be where I have gone.”

The work references both Ilya Repin’s painting of Leo Tolstoy Barefoot and the teachings of Diogenes, who was one of the founders of the philosophical school of Cynicism. Swoon recalls her father telling the the story of when Diogenes, sat on the roadside eating lentils, met Aristippus; the latter argued that, "If you would learn to be subservient to the king, you would not have to live on lentils" to which Diogenes retorted, “if you learn to live on lentils, and you will not have to cultivate the king.” This lesson in the meaning of freedom appears to have left a lasting impression on Swoon helping her to go out into the world and create the impossible, from Adriatic flotillas and Haitian community centres to works which bust taboos and help us all to see the world differently.

Photo credit: feralthings

Streets: Unmute Gaza 31 May 2024 4:37 PM (10 months ago)

Emerging as a creative response in support of Palestinian photojournalists, Unmute Gaza has brought together an array of artists highlighting the unimaginable suffering currently being experienced by the people of Gaza. The project features interpretations of photographs captured on the ground in the exclave which can be easily downloaded and pasted up around the world; so far interventions have been seen across 83 cities in 30 different countries. These images both make visible the suffering which is all too absent from much of the media’s reporting on the issue and also highlight that according to the Committee To Protect Journalists more than 105 journalists have been killed over the past seven months; this accounts for more than three-quarters of all media workers killed worldwide during that period and the deadliest period for journalists since the CPJ began gathering data in 1992.

Approximately 125 hostages remain unaccounted for since Hamas’ attack on 7th October but Unmute Gaza stresses that the civilian population “cannot be the victim of collective punishment, so it is necessary to stop the cycle of violence against innocent people.” While the images capture individual stories of trauma in Gaza, many are also emblematic of broader issues. Axel Void and Maverick Mura have recreated Sameh Nidal-Rahmi's aerial photo of the a-Rimal neighbourhood in Gaza City which was destroyed by shelling on 10th October 2023; it is estimated that to date over 62% of all homes in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed. Jofre Oliveras has painted a still from a video taken by Mariam Abu Dagga of children in Rafah scrambling to get a free meal in February 2024; Volker Türk, UN high commissioner for human rights, has said that there is evidence Israel is withholding the delivery of aid which has pushed Gaza to the brink of famine. One of Escif's watercolours shows Samia Al Atrash, herself a journalist, embracing and saying her goodbyes to her two-year old niece Masa who, along with her sister Lina, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in October 2023; women and children account for the majority of the over 35,000 Palestinian deaths.

In addition to their wheat pasting, this latter image, based on a photo by Mahmoud Bassam, was unfurled as a banner from the third floor of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Shepard Fairey's print, based on Belal Khaled's heartbreaking image of a child crying for help, covered the façade of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid following guerrilla action in partnership with Greenpeace; the museum is significant as home to Picasso's emblematic anti-war epic Guernica. Talking about his involvement, Obey said “I feel morally obliged to amplify the message of Belal's photography. I believe in solutions to disagreements that avoid violence.”

All artworks are available as free assets to be printed and pasted by the public from https://unmutegaza.com

Photo credits: Nima Taheri, Fruit of the Lump, Luna Park and Greenpeace/MarioGomez

Showing: Aryz – ‘Vanitas’ @ National Pantheon (Lisboa) 17 Apr 2024 5:02 PM (11 months ago)

Housed within the central rotunda of Lisboa’s National Pantheon, Aryz’s latest installation takes full advantage of its emblematic surroundings to re-frame the centuries-old conversation about our own mortality. The two works reference the vanitas paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries which sought to emphasize the transience of life. An archetypal example by an unknown artists hangs elsewhere within the former Church of Santa Engrácia and this still life is populated with an assortment of memento mori: a recently-extinguished candle, an hour-glass through which the sands of time have run and a skull, as the ultimate reminder of death.

In stark contrast to these invariably small, achromatic paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, the diptych by the Spanish artist has been painted on a monumental scale and are saturated with color. But perhaps the most important differentiation lies in the detail: the candle is still lit, the flowers remain in bloom and the skull is imbued with a sort of frenetic el Día de Muertos energy. Context has always been centrally important to the work of artists like Aryz who cut their teeth painting in the street and, indeed, the setting of the installation within the Pantheon provides the key to understanding these differences. 

Entombed with the Pantheon are some of Portugal’s most influential public figures such as the footballer Eusébio, the singer Amália Rodrigues and the writer Aquilino Ribeiro. Death may have come for them all, as forewarned by those vanitas painters of the past, but their contributions still echo through Portuguese society and live on through the beauty, passion and insight which they have given to others. In the words of the writer Jeffrey Cranor ‘Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you’.

The installation is part of the Underdogs Public Art Programme and continues until 23rd June 2024 at the National Pantheon, Campo de Santa Clara, 1100-471 Lisboa.

Photo credit: feralthings

Recap: Bartek Świątecki AKA Pener – ‘Chasing The Wind’ @ Chenus Longhi 17 Mar 2024 2:40 PM (last year)

Last weekend saw the conclusion of Bartek Świątecki’s Chasing The Wind exhibition at Chenus Longhi in Paris. It seems that Poland has produced a disproportionately large number of artists who started out writing graffiti and have then stretched the movement’s foundational principles to oblivion in their own unique ways, creating new languages of expression in the process. Świątecki, also known as Pener, was part of the Spectrum crew alongside the likes of Proembrion and later painted walls in Bydgoszcz with Sainer and Bezt before increasingly turning his attention to his studio practice.

His studio is based in Olsztyn and this new body of work heavily references the surrounding Masuria region’s natural environment. The canvases and panels are built up with multiple layers of paint and glaze which provide a hyper-saturated interpretation of some of the regions 2,000 ultramarine lakes, verdant forested hills and yellow wild flower meadows. While, for some, plein-air landscape painting conjures up notions of sedate and gentile relaxation, Pener instead embraces the chaotic energy of nature through the use of thrusting, angular mark-making and dynamic, fluid composition.

Photo credit: feralthings

Streets: Banksy (North London) 17 Mar 2024 1:51 PM (last year)

Banksy is back, with a new, large-scale street piece appearing overnight on a residential building on Hornsey Road, midway between the Archway and Finsbury Park areas of North London.

AM was prompted out of hermit mode, jumped on a bus, and went to have look, before the artwork could be dogged by the petty-minded/envious, sidebusted by coattail-riders, or covered in perspex. 

The whimsical mural interacts with a tree in the foreground — a rather sad-looking, currently leafless specimen that was aggressively lopped and topped by local authorities.

Having taken matters into their own hands, a stencil-sprayed character has attempted to replicate the missing foliage using a paint-filled fire extinguisher.

The piece references themes of environmentalism and activism. Perhaps also the battle against apathy, and the importance of taking an individual stand — even when such efforts may lead to partial failure (like the character covering not just the wall in paint, but also herself), or ultimate futility (given that new leaves will soon be sprouting on the tree).

It is surely no coincidence that this green spectacle was also unveiled on 17 March.

Photo credit: Patrick Nguyen.

Showing: Invader – ‘Invader Space Station’ 8 Mar 2024 6:27 AM (last year)

For three months, visitors are invited to step aboard Invader Space Station to experience the Parisian artist’s most artistically and physically expansive exhibition to date. The show is being held in the modernist edifice which was once home to Libération, the newspaper whose pages the artist invaded in 2011. Upon entering, visitors are met with a barrage of sound and light emanating from an installation which occupies the entirety of the first of nine floors; the classic Space Invaders arcade game has been reimagined in physical form with the rigid, plastic lane dividers that are a common sight during road works deputizing for the alien foes. 

The exhibition has been timed to coincide with the 1500th Parisian Invader and visitors can look through a telescope to see PA_1500 adorning the exterior of the Centre Pompidou on the other side of Le Marais. Invader has described his Invasions as being like viruses. If this is indeed the case, they are now perhaps most alike to SINEs and LINEs - retroviruses which have integrated into our own DNA and now account for 35% of the human genome.  While his tiled creations may have once appeared to be incongruous additions to the City of Light, they have grown to become a fundamental part of its physical environment, as integral as Haussmanian architecture or the tricolour hanging outside public buildings. The exhibition includes an oversized map plotting the location of all of Paris’ invaders as well as individual close-up photos of each one. 

But actual tiles are conspicuous by their absence throughout the exhibition; instead, there’s an exploration of the broad spectrum of Invader's work from stickers in the stairwells to films in a custom purpose-built cinema. Those who missed his Prints on Paper exhibition at the MGLC in Ljubljana due to COVID lockdowns now have a second chance to enjoy his 23 years of print making, this time around including a new, and as yet unreleased, series of camo prints. The exhibition also enters new territory with a dive into Invader’s obsessive collecting of Kinder Surprise toys. The clinical presentation of the actual toys is suggestive of Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy series, while their hyper-enlarged photos embrace Jeff Koon’s celebration of the kitsch and the disposable. 

The exhibition extends over 3500m² but there are subtle and playful details throughout the show's curation: hidden alongside over 1000 ordinary toys are a handful which Invader has customised to create proverbial Easter eggs from literal Kinder Eggs; a Rubikscubist version of the malevolent protagonist from the film Man Bites Dog has been positioned so that his semi-automatic is levelled at a blue toy with its hands raised elsewhere in the exhibition; a discretely positioned fan creates gentle ripples in the replica of the 21 metre long banner that was pulled by a plane along the Côte d’Azur back in 2021, simulating it fluttering in the wind. 

The exhibition continues until 5 May 2024 at 11 rue Béranger, 75003 Paris and tickets can be booked at https://invaderspacestation.seetickets.com

Photo credit: feralthings

Opening: Sickboy – ‘Optical Delusions’ @ Harvey Nichols (Bristol) 24 Nov 2023 7:10 AM (last year)

Mixing art and fine dining, Sickboy (interviewed) is kicking off his latest show at the high-end department store Harvey Nichols tonight with a launch dinner and artist's talk. Optical Delusions is presented by Fluorescent Smogg and builds upon his ever-expanding use of semiotics to create a dream-like world that glows and radiates light.

The Bristol-based artist has long experimented with an array of unorthodox mediums: from painting on bell-jars in the early 2000s, to creating tapestries a decade later and onwards to the lightboxes which dominate this most recent exhibition. These illuminated works appear like a modernist evocation of the stained glass windows that adorn many churches, and as such, they are very much in keeping with the oblique but ever-present biblical references to redemption, salvation and the sweet-ever-after which can be found throughout his oeuvre; in many ways, these are the perfect visual accompaniment to the gospel and soul music which the artist so loves.

A number of light boxes are highly graphic, but others introduce far more painterly techniques to this medium. The layout of some of these works mirrors that of a comic book, but rather than presenting an easily accessible linear narrative, we instead have a Gysin-esque mash up of imagery to explore and unravel. Each panel contains a picture that is capable of standing alone, but in this format, they instead enter into a dialogue with the neighbouring panel and create something which veers from the playful and spiritually-uplifting to the disorienting and anxiety-inducing. 

The show is on display at Harvey Nichols, 27 Philadelphia St, Quakers Friars, Bristol BS1 3BZ.

Photo credit: feralthings

Showing: José Parlá – ‘Phosphene’ @ Ben Brown (London) 17 Nov 2023 1:43 PM (last year)

Closing today after a four week run, Phosphene is José Parlá’s second show at Ben Brown Fine Art’s London location. The title references the phenomenon of seeing light without any external stimulus and the exhibition features 11 large scale canvases infused with kinetic and sensory energy.

For many, graffiti is a means to exist beyond the corporeal and social confinement of our current circumstances and the now Brooklyn-based artist's Ease tag was like a visual mantra repeated across south Miami in search of personal perfection. His balletic hand-style is still a foundational element of his work but as his practice has developed it has been turned and used as a tool to instead create work centred upon community and society. This particular body of work is the fourth and final in a series of works which have followed Parlá’s near fatal hospitalisation after contracting COVID-19 and there is a strong thematic focus on healing and rebirth. The work undoubtedly deals with his own personal journey as he recovered from the mental and physical atrophy caused by three months in a coma, but it also operates on multiple different levels and deals with the urgent need for us as a society to rebuild our failing political, economic and societal infrastructure. As such, Parlá’s work occupies a liminal space somewhere between the street and the museum, between the personal and the communal, between life and death. 

The exhibition's focus on rebirth is underpinned by a rich array of artistic, scientific and civic associations within the canvases. Chromatically, the works share the same fiery spectrum of colors we see when lava-flows cool to form new land but it also brings to mind the palette employed by William Blake to depict the creation of the Earth in The Ancient of Days. In terms of their form, the works still appear to contain a subtle allusion to the landscapes of Anselm Kiefer which explored the rebuilding of society - Parlá’s cursive mark-making is suggestive of the elegantly simple early cloud chamber photography which captured anti-matter, the elusive but essential building block of the universe. The Cuban-American artist's calligraphy glides across the surface of these Phosphene works, disappearing behind one layer of acrylic only to re-emerge from behind another with a grace and penetration which suggests the paintbrush is passing through time and drawn all together as one newly unified presence.

Photo credit: feralthings

Openings: Jeff Soto – “Sadlands” @ KP Projects 27 Sep 2023 2:11 PM (last year)

Earlier this month, Jeff Soto's (interviewed) new exhibition Sadlands opened up in West Hollywood at KP Projects. Showing though the end of the month, the striking new body of work featured almost 20 medium to large sized paintings inspired by a post-apocalyptic Southern Californian landscape. Each piece, rendered in vibrant colors, correlates loosely with a location that the Riverside native denoted on a map (displayed in the gallery) with the sides of the frames painted to color coordinate with each pinned location. This conceptual thread nicely holds the new pieces that comprise the show together as well as the amazing details one begins to recognize on closer examination including iconic local landmarks like The Broad, Disneyland's Matterhorn Mountain, Watts Towers, and Angel's stadium signage.