Welcome to State of SEEN the weekly newsletter about all things happening in the SEEN ecosystem.
Auction Recap
This week, Leegan Koo and Seamus Conley had their debut on the SEEN HAUS platform!
Leegan’s work is often a blend of classical timeless painting style with a splash of SpongeBob or includes Jack in the Box. His piece Pikabob was inspired by experimenting with swapping faces of well-known cartoon characters with various non associating place and sold for 0.67 ETH.
Award winning and self-taught artist Seamus Conley sold his piece called Clouded for 1.6 ETH, the artwork combines imagery that reflects some sort of perceived reality with a balance of fantasy and imagination.
Drop Preview
This week is stacked with auctions, as we have three artists and a total of five drops in the pipeline.
3 Artists — 1 Theme — Fading Fiat
Lewis Bannister
He often found his style transforming from one and developing into another form of painting on unusual surfaces. His editions of painted notes have taken off with urban art. Lewis found his creative voice after his art teacher in London presented him a copy of ‘Spraycan art’ which thrusted his career. He finds it hard to pigeon hole his artistic expression into one form as it’s more fluid than most.
Lewis often uses a combination of spray can imagery alongside the classical Mickey Mouse popping up from the $1 bill instead of George Washington, the first American President. The treasury being displayed as Scrooge McDuck from the 1947 Walt Disney character, the most rich, greedy and grumpy character of all. All implying the goofy history behind the history of the US Dollar that few would dare poke fun at.
Onepennypiece
“Onepennypiece” is a stencil artist, who gave up a well paid career as a neurosurgeon and instead used his scalpel for the more worthy pursuit of cutting holes in paper.
Penny jokes that he used to be a neurosurgeon that now uses his talent with a scalpel to cut holes in paper. With much precision and detail it’s that of a skilled surgeon. He finds inspiration in everyday objects but money is the recurring theme in the subversive ideas behind street art.
Showing cryptic and poetic meanings through imagery and adding classic cartoon characters like the Simpsons onto the US dollar, to show fiat currency’s ridiculous inflationary value which brings a comical twist to a serious matter.
Joey Colombo
Joey Colombo is a self-taught artist living in California with a studio in Berkeley. It all started as a doodle on a dollar bill and quickly grew into a complex artistic form of one-liners and graffiti to outerwear and large format pieces. He collects bills from around the world, with different stories and energies behind the notes and he manipulates his own story through his artistic expression.
Joey’s creative process involves cutting up fiat money across the globe and transferring the power of money given by governments and institutions, to create his own unique message and taking back the power. Money is about control. Bills in essence carry the meaning of different locations, cultures, ideologies and time periods. Cutting them up releases Joey’s own vision onto the bill that never existed before. It turns into a new bill, a new story, and a new currency with new meaning. It’s a very powerful provoking conversation piece to have one of these as part of your art collection.
Community
This week we introduced Twitter Spaces as our new format for our artist interviews, hosted by none other than SEEN OG doublewordscore! During this lively interview a new star was born on the podcast scene!
Anyone is welcome to contribute to the development of the protocol. If you have a particular area of expertise you think would be valuable feel free to reach out and we can figure out a way to get you involved.
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That’s it for this edition of ‘State of SEEN’. You can follow the project on Twitter, Discord, Telegram, and here on Medium.
Check out the previous issue using the link below:
https://seen-haus.medium.com/state-of-seen-volume-12-28cf38f9a2fe
See you next time!
-the seen haus team
