"Having decided to use St. Nicholas to front their winter advertising campaign in the 1930's, Coke completely reinvented him to become the Red and White, Merry Father Christmas we now associate with the holiday. Coca-Cola were already using the Great Depression to boost sales by describing Coke as an instant refresher and maker of happiness.

The installation was based on the idea of making Father Christmas overindulged, perhaps bogged down by the weight of the brand, being told how we should feel doesnt always make for happy, refreshed people!".. . Laura Keeble

Artist: cabaio/stencilsystem

In Bangkok, murals have started to pop up all over the city taking to the streets the issue of dying elephants. Chris tells us:

"Elephants have been dying on the streets of Bangkok while being used to beg for money, conditions are bad for them when they are brought into the city from the village to beg, they inevitably get ran over or die of disease/malnutrition."

Last weekend Sara and I started going through our storage and we found three boxes of the "Wooster Comix #1' that we self published back late 2005.

Looking through the book it's amazing to see early work by such artists as Adam Neate, Judith Supine, Anthony Lister and many other artists who today, three years later, have become quite well known.

In the middle of 2005 we invited a group of our favorite artists to try their hand at creating a series of narratives that featured their characters and street iconography. Most of the artists had never tried adapting their work into a storyline, so the project became equal parts challenging, exciting, and - ultimately - extremely creative and rewarding.

The result was Wooster Comix #1, an book that brought together over 35 artists from around the world including:

Dr. D, Goin, Lobster Roll, Travis Millard, Adam Neate, Bob Krobbauer, Allison Cole, Vinnie Ray, Mel Kadel, Jon Burgerman, Isoe, Justin Kees, Lennard, The Killer Gerbil, MCA, Diego Bergia, Cody Hudson, 0190ren, Matthew Rodriguez, Urban Medium, Pash, Zonenkinder, Ryan Browne, TVboy, Tofer, Rekal, Judith Supine, Numskull, Rafael Badilla, Tihm, Pure Evil, Anthony Lister, Drawwer, Caliper Boy, Eric Orr, Mike Clark

This evening we put together a video tour of the book with annotations by Sara and I.

We still have 300 books left of the 2000 we printed back in 2005. They're $10.00 each USD. Perfect for the holidays.

Here's the specs:

Softcover
64 pages
Black and White
6.5" by 10.25"

("Facebook", spray paint on scrap-yard, Bamako - Mali, 2008 )

("Microsoft", Paint on barrels, Bamako-Mali. 2008)

("Flickr", Paint on wall, Phnom Penh-Cambodia. 2007)

("Myspace", Paint on wall, Phnom Penh-Cambodia. 2007)

The more we see of Filippo Minelli's work, the more we've love it. We were really struck by his ongoing series "Contradictions" so we asked Filippo to tell us a bit about the images. We thought we'd share with you his response:

"All my "Contradictions" ongoing project has the same motivation/meaning. Technologies and the marketing behind them usually push the almost religious aspect of their evolution, as also said by Leander Kaheny in his "Cult of Mac" book, and the users are pushed to live in an intense way the abstraction from reality, living technologies only as an idea and sometimes without even knowing their real functions. And this aspect works for the social-networks too. The idealization connected with these experiences provokes a small-but-important detach of the perception of reality and what i want to do by writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life we are living in the slums of the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies. It's a kind of reminder, for people like me which i'm an Apple user and also have social-network accounts that the real world is deeply far from the idealization we have of it, not only in the third world and even if technologies and globalization are good things. I hope it's clear and sorry for my italian-english" ;)"

You can see more of Filippo's work here.

Age: 30
Hometown: Okemos, MI, USA
Where do you now live?: Hong Kong
Where would you most like to live?: Buenos Aires
Who was your first "hero" in life?: Eazy-E
What is your favorite thing to do on your day off from work?: Coffee and the Internet.

What is your favorite color?: BADA55 (a very specific shade of light green)

Who (or what) do you love?: When Grape Lady goes down:

Wooster: Who and/or what are some of your influences?

I've learned a lot (either directly or indirectly) from the following people: Cory Archangel, Mark Jenkins, Banksy, Sean Carter, Zach Lieberman, Jonah Peretti, Leon Reid, Kanye West, Biggie, Richard Stallman, Stephen Powers, Damien Hurst, Edward Tufte, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Lessig, Le Courbusier.

Wooster: How would you describe your art to someone who could not see it?

LOLs for the revolution.

Wooster: What other talent would most like to have?*

The ability to sell art for money.

Wooster: What do you fear the most?

Working for other people.

Wooster: What is your greatest ambition?

To have Kanye post my stuff on his blog.

You can learn more about Evan's work on his blog and his website.

"The guys from the MuTate Britain show came to see me about getting some posters up in London , I went to see the venue set in the heart of Shoreditch East London and was blown away. Warehouse space like this is fast becoming history as the whole of East London is becoming gentrified as more money pours into the area and in the name of the forth coming 2012 Olympics the street art and even the homeless are getting jet washed off the streets. The organizers let me get involved with some pieces inside the multi level venue and on the shutters on the front. I got the first of my series of Bent Commandments up on the front, 120 strips of paper and 8 hours work , it'll be changing as the show progresses .

It's exactly what a gallery should be, masses of artists (when I asked the organisers even they didn't know just how many people were involved, I've counted at least 50) no pretention and a warehouse full of the greatest variety of art, street to metalwork sculpture perfect bedfellows in this industrial venue.

I won't name check all the artists here because I'll forget and offend someone, check the flyer or the website, the organizers Garfield ,Liam , Mr E. Dawe and Spencer have pulled off a blinder here and deserve a name check along with the legendary Mutoid Waste company.

By the way , there isn't any connection with the other Tate except this is what the other one should be."... Dr. D

MuTate Britain
Behind The Shutters Gallery
87-95 Curtain Road
London EC2a 3BS

Opens fri/sat/sun 2pm til 10pm until Christmas.

More photos here.

Hometown: Rome
Where do you now live?: Rome
Where would you most like to live?: I fear any thing is not Rome, then Rome.
Who was your first "hero" in life?: My cousin, he’s called Leone “Lion” and he was 4 older than me.
What is your favorite thing to do on your day off from work?: Fishing with Lex on the Tevere river.
What is your favorite color?: Red
Who (or what) do you love?: I love Beatrice like Dante.
Who and/or what are some of your influences? I like everything is printed since the print was born. So I like Piranesi, Dorè and the daily newspapers. And I love the stuff of Bast and Faile. I admire the way of JR of pasting up the same poster over different planes and surfaces; in that way the poster became the wall. But influences mostly comes by Alessandra and by the churchs of Rome.

Wooster: What other artists do you most admire?

My favorites street artists are Blu, Giotto, Swoon, N4t4, Bergognone, Gaia, Rello Rocca, Gentile da Fabriano, Madame Archer, Raffaello, Vhils, Lex.

Wooster:How would you describe your art to someone who could not see it?

I mostly work in black and white my stencils and my posters remember the prints in black and white. I work mostly with half tone, dots, points, pixels., lines, I called this way of cutting stencil “hole school”. I like the mix between the abstract pattern that you see in a close view and the realism you can note by a far view. I do mostly portraits of anonymous persons and of a girl I know.

Wooster:What do you fear the most?

Twin Peaks

Wooster:What is your greatest ambition?

To be a champion of “calcio” like Roberto Baggio.

You can see more of Sten's work here.

Asbestos' latest exhibition (which opened last Thursday) is a series of paintings of the faces and hands of boxers from Ligoniel Amateur Boxing club. Each portrait was done on objects found in the skips and streets of Belfast.

The show runs through the 11th of December at Safehouse Gallery, 25 Donegall Street, Belfast 028 9031 4499 .

(mural by M-City)

URBAN PAINTING is an amazing street art show managed by the municipality of Carugate and curated by Luigi Mauri and his wife Tatiana Belluzzo. Similar to our 11 Spring show, the idea of Urban Painting was to do a great street art show without any sponsors for two days with no advertising. Inside at ATRION IN CARUGATE original artwork from more than 35 artists around the worlld was displayed.

You can see a full set of photos here.

You can see the whole series here.

"when I make graffiti in the street I don't write my name. I developed a way to draw characters with one line, as a kind of tag that is a character and not a name. I decided to make a stop-motion animation piece of these "tags" as a way to show the movement of them being drawn. each frame was hand painted on a large sheet of paper, taped to my flatmate's bedroom wall. the final animation was shown at my solo show ("Searching For The Perfect Line") at Vicious Gallery in Hamburg, alongside the paper the animation was painted on."... Dave The Chimp

Blu returned to Berlin this month. To see him in action, watch the video below:

The final piece (nicked from Blu's blog)

(Thanks, Just)

(Thanks, Carrie)

From rainbath:

"did this downtown by my house on one of the busiest days! the day after thanksgiving. basically the installation reads...why do so many look away. how would it feel to be invisible? even for just a day? how would it feel to be homeless for whatever reason it may be."

More here.