Additional viewing hours:
Saturday, July 12, 12:30-1:30pm
Tuesday, July 15, 6:30-8pm.

Mixed media and sculpture.

SPACE 242 proudly announces its sixth exhibition of 2008, INK & STEEL, featuring illustrations, paintings and mixed media by Ansis Purins and metal sculpture by Skunk. The opening reception, Friday, June 27, runs from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. in Boston’s South End.

Ink & Steel is sculptor Skunk’s major exhibition, featuring a variety of metal sculptures, hand-welded from recycled bicycle parts. “Lately I’ve been excited about blurring the line between art and toys,” he notes. “I want people to give up the ridiculous notion that playing is something only kids should do.” Among his many creations are “Hathor,” a righteous female warrior, literally armed with saws and “Mobot,” a larger-than-life primitive bot. The exhibition also features hand-assembled “guns” and other creatures, some even made of discarded bicycle chains.

“I’m proud of the cuts, flash burns, and bruises I have from working with big hunks of metal. I can singe steel with a torch and weld materials together that I thought were incompatible.” He takes great enjoyment in “the accidental discoveries” found in trying something new. According to Skunk, “A robot isn’t finished until I start making beeping and whirring noises to myself; and a raygun isn’t complete until I can’t stop posing like a space gunslinger in the mirror.”

Skunk may be best known as the leader of SCUL (Subversive Choppers Urban Legion), a bicycle “chopper gang,” which he founded in 1996. SCUL members can be seen in large groups of cyclists, some of whom create and build their own “ships” including “Cloudbuster,” Skunk’s transport, a 200-pound tall-bike, equipped with party lights, a sound system, and a 20-foot telescoping disco ball.

By trade, Skunk fabricates and welds custom titanium and steel bicycles at Seven Cycles in Watertown, MA. He attended both the University of Maine at Orono and Massachusetts College of Art, and resides in Somerville.

Ink & Steel marks the first full exhibition for Ansis Purins in nearly a decade. A cartoonist and illustrator, his body of work features three-dimensional paintings, illustrations, and mixed media and may be described as “kitsch horrific.” Captivated by 50s-era illustration and horror films, “I find the line between horror and humor to be fascinating, and a central theme to my work,” says Purins. “I love creating stages, scenes, and characters – incorporating them into works that invite repeat viewings to absorb all the details.”

He notes a huge range of artistic influences from Hanna-Barbera cartoons to the Japanese woodblock print masters Hokusai and Yoshitoshi, as well as Gary Panter. His work has been published in The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix, Rocktober and Lollipop Magazines, and in 2007 won Print Magazine’s Regional Design Award. He self-publishes the comics Zombre (nominated for a Fanley Award), Gnome Gathering, and Duppy. A first generation Latvian, Mr. Purins studied at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Currently at work on a “mammoth” graphic novel The Magic Forest, he resides in Jamaica Plain.

INK & STEEL is sponsored in part by The Weekly Dig and ArtScope Magazine.

Boston Underground Film Festival (BUFF) will show film shorts in the mini theatre.