Fecal Face contributor Rachel Ralph (rachel(at)fecalface.com) profiles this Oakland based painter's forthcoming residency and travels to Japan. His paintings will be on display in the SFMOMA's windows during their upcoming construction.
Photos: Megan Wolfe

John Felix Arnold III leaves for Japan tomorrow and it's going to be a transformative five weeks for him. This trip, complete with meditative and artistic practice, will provide an intimate understanding of his own process and spiritual growth in this world and in his world of Unstoppable Tomorrow. Unstoppable Tomorrow, a trope Felix works through in every piece, is a post-apocalyptic world in which people have no choice but to work together to stay alive. By experiencing ancient temples and gardens first-hand through deep meditative states as well as daily interactions and exploration, we will see new conversations arise in his work. These new visions will carry his thoughts on the necessity of future spirituality further into the global stage. Instead of staying isolated in his studio, he is taking his practice across the world, opening it and himself up to new people and experiences and I cannot wait to see how this affects his process.

Felix will continue to update me on his travels, and I will continue to post them to the site as a way to see how this trip specifically affects his work. By diving head-first into a culture on the other side of the world, this trip will reveal a lot about him as an artist. He is removing all barriers imposed upon him by his life in the states while taking on new challenges and unforeseen experiences abroad. Keep watching the site to see how this develops before seeing the work in person when it opens on June 8th here in San Francisco, at his project In Memory Of... an installation of new work created specifically for the SFMoMA's windows. -Rachel Ralph (rachel(at)fecalface.com)

FFDG is pleased to present San Francisco based artists Alex Ziv and Mario Ayala in the two person show entitled "Going Nowhere" featuring 22 new mixed media works on paper. Both artists are attending The San Francisco Art Institute with Alex Ziv studying for his MFA in painting while Mario Ayala in his last year for a BFA in painting. An opening reception is scheduled for Friday, April 12th (6-9pm). The artists will be present. Beer and wine will be available.

Going Nowhere
Alex Ziv & Mario Ayala
Opening reception: Friday, April 12th (6–9pm)
@FFDG, San Francisco
2277 Mission St.

Skewville's new show opens Saturday, April 13th, at White Walls with Mark Warren Jacques showing in the White Walls Project Space.

Skewville is an art collective consisting of two twin brothers born and raised in Queens, NY known for their public art, the most popular example being their hand made wooden sneakers that they have been tossing over telephones lines and documenting since 1999. Since then thousands have been silkscreened, hand cut, drilled, laced, and then tossed all around the globe.

Work by Mark Warren Jacques

Work by Mark Warren Jacques

Work by Mark Warren Jacques

Work by Skewville

Work by Skewville

Kyle Norris, a graphic designer/artist for a ski company in Orange County, CA and graduate of RISD Illustration with a concentration in design, emailed over these weird faces mysteriously composed of forgotten artifacts.

In the ever-expanding genres of vinyl and resin based sculptural art, there are often players behind the scenes making some of the most impressive pieces come together. Whether you hang out at ComicCon or Art Basel Miami, you've seen sculptural works that PIP (Pretty in Plastic) literally had a hand (or several) in fabricating. Here, Fecal Face interviews PIP founder, owner and fabrication mastermind Julie B., to find out more about how their work all plays out.

My family is super creative in a combination of science and art. They're very talented artists but their generation stressed going to college for things other than art, so they're both science teachers. I grew up around a lot of science and creative energy,

I started as a biology major and after the first year (in 1997), I dropped out and moved to California. I saw a job posting that said "artist wanted," got the job and began sculpting doll characters for them, even though I had never taken a formal sculpting class.

It happened really organically. I was working in the back of Meltdown, and then moved across the street to Span of Sunset. I was doing a lot of prototyping for them and making a lot of molds and castings. Then different artists approached me to do multiples. The Amanda Vissel piece was one of our first projects.

Well, I had had a job in Brooklyn doing toy prototyping prior to that, and so I had very good training. When I came out here to California I realized that the artists here needed the service of sculpting and multiples. And it kind of blew up from there.

We never even had to launch Pretty in Plastic- we just began getting work, and then it just grew and grew from there. No marketing- just word of mouth. That was back in 2005. I think I started off with the name Toy Girl, I was inspired by Tank Girl. From there the company just formed very naturally because the need was there.

Anywhere from design to prototyping, to creating physical samples, to doing limited editions, and fine art creation. Then we move into more of the large scale fabrications, which is what we're really focusing on now: Cnc Milling, vacuum-forming, roto-casting, and installations.

I live in SF. I drove across the US last summer in a 30 ft. RV from SF to Brooklyn and did portrait series called Darth Across America, every day people in every day situations, wearing a Darth Vader mask. I raised $2600 through Kickstarter along the way, that paid for gas and beer. I was travelling with 2 other photographers who also did a series of portraits. Mine drew the most attention. It was an experiment in a way, to see if I could use a pop culture icon to unite people that had nothing in common. I was right. I created a community of people across the United States that continue to follow my project, which is soon to be a book. -Julie Schuchard

Our buddy Henrik Haven, who brings us some goodies from his native Copenhagen, has been shooting some of his city's graffiti and street art. Much to offer, we've broken the posts into 3 and will be posting more in the coming days.

"Happiness Forever" was made with mechanical pencils and coloured pencils on pH neutral 100% rag acid free paper, 41.5 cm in diameter. -Adam Batchelor (Norfolk, England)

http://www.adambatchelor.co.uk/

San Francisco based Clare Rojas, whose work used to look like this a few years back, has simplified her style over the years. Her current show which opened April 5th at Gallery Nicolai Wallner in Copenhagen.

FFDG is pleased to present San Francisco based artists Alex Ziv and Mario Ayala in the two person show entitled "Going Nowhere" featuring 22 new mixed media works on paper. Both artists are attending The San Francisco Art Institute with Alex Ziv studying for his MFA in painting while Mario Ayala in his last year for a BFA in painting. An opening reception is scheduled for Friday, April 12th (6-9pm). The artists will be present. Beer and wine will be available.

Going Nowhere
Alex Ziv & Mario Ayala
Opening reception: Friday, April 12th (6–9pm)
@FFDG, San Francisco
2277 Mission St.

Last week to view Mexico City based Curiot's solo show Age of Omuktlans at San Francisco's FFDG. Hours: Wed thru Sat (1-6pm). | 2277 Mission St. @19th

Ryan Heshka was born in Manitoba, Canada, and grew up in Winnipeg. Fueled by long prairie winters, he spent a lot of his childhood drawing, building cardboard cities and making super 8 films. Early influences that persist to this day include antiquated comics and pulp magazines, natural history, graphic design and music, movies and animation. Formally trained in interior design, he is self-taught as an artist. His illustrations (represented by Kate Larkworthy) has appeared in Vanity Fair, Playboy, Wall Street Journal, Esquire, the New York Times, Smart Money, and on the cover and interiors of BLAB!.

Before his large mural for the Galore Urban Art Festival (Copenhagen) last summer, the Spanish street artist Aryz travelled an hour away from Copenhagen to reach Nastved, a town that lies on the island of Zealand. Here he painted a fresh piece on a mural (opposite to the old post office close to Naestved Station, which is a part of Naestved Youth School of Art and decoration project "Nestved Art City". While he was in the town he also painted some cool pieces on large MDF wood panels and these works aro now on display at the local waiting room at Naetved Station.

Oil on linen works by Adam Sorensen (Born: 1976, Chicago, IL) whose show just concluded at PDX Contemporary Art in Portland.

100 Years ago, the Champawat Tiger attacked and killed 436 villagers in India and Nepal. Manik Nakra has taken on the project of documenting all 436 tiger attacks with watercolor drawings. He put them on tumblr: www.thetigering.tumblr.com. The project is called: "THE TIGERING!"

The Champawat Tiger was a legendary female Bengal tiger responsible for an estimated 436 deaths in Nepal and the Kumaon area of India, mostly during the 19th century.

After killing over 200 people in Nepal, the tigeress was driven by the Nepalese Army across the border (river Sarda) into India, where she continued her massacring in the Kumaon District. A maneater so fearless, all her killings occurred during the daytime.

The tigress was finally shot in 1907 by a British colonel born in India named Jim Corbett, a dramatic feat confirmed by about 300 villagers. Since then, Corbett has been elevated to the level of a sadhu(saint) in the region and a monument has been constructed at the tigress death site. When India broke free of colonial rule in 1947, they opened their first national park, Jim Corbett National Park.

In January 2012, after reading this story in Man-Eaters of Kumaon (a journal kept by Jim Corbett), I began a project documenting all 436 tiger attacks. 
Why? Because its fucking badass. But along the way it turned into an installation about modernizing identities and an allegory for the messy and maddening road to progress in India. All drawings are watercolor and gouache on paper, 12in x 16in (30.4cm x 40.6cm)

MAZE WALKERS
Work by Mark Whalen
Opening Thursday 4 April, 6-8pm
Exhibition: 2 - 20 April, 2013

Chalk Horse
8 Lacey Street
Surry Hills NSW 2010, Australia

One of our favorite's, the Italian duo Sten & Lex, emailed over some images from their current show running through April 30th in Shanghai, China at Magda Danysz Gallery

Sten & Lex have been doing stencils on the street since 2000/2001 and today their work is part of the urban landscape in their home town of Rome, London, Paris, Barcelona, New York. During that early period in Rome, and Italy in general, there didn’t exist a strong stencil culture such as there was in France and Sten & Lex may be considered as the pioneers of "Stencil Graffiti" in Italy and were the first to be considered "stencil artists". All the work of Sten & Lex results from an individual path that developed far from art academies and design institutes and far from classic writing and graffiti background. The duo are best known in the history of stencil making for introducing the halftone stencil technique where the main part of their stencil portraits are composed by thousands of lines. They usually produce portraits from people they have photographed themselves or found in family photos album, anonymous people.

An estimated 70 million sharks killed each year to satisfy the unsustainable appetite for shark fin soup. As an apex predator at the top of the food chain, sharks play a vital role in ways common fish do not. In virtually every part of the ocean, sharks keep fish populations healthy and in proper balance. In areas where sharks have been over-fished, we are already seeing obvious change for the worse.

PangeaSeed is a non profit whose mission is raise public awareness and education surrounding the conservation and preservation of sharks and other marine species in peril.

This weekend PangeaSeed in collaboration with Tokyo-based vinyl toy designer Cometdebris (Koji Harmon), are pleased to announce their latest shark-saving effort: Sametan – Don't Tread on Me. For one weekend only, March 29-30, 2013, at the Spoke Art Gallery (816 Sutter St) in San Francisco, we will host a one of a kind art exhibition featuring 30 custom Sametan vinyl figures designed by 30 global artists including Frank Kozik, Buff Monster, Jenn Porreca and many more.

Suckadelic

Scott Hove and Sametan