DE VIGUEUR et DE VERVE! press release

Hatch Kingdom | Stickerkitty

International Sticker Exhibition

DE VIGUEUR et DE VERVE!

Fresh Paint – Peint Frais

Edition III

Hatch Kingdom, the only sticker museum in the world, has collaborated with Catherine Tedford, a.k.a. Stickerkitty, to present an exhibition of street art stickers and photographs from Berlin and New York City, with additional pieces from cities across Europe and North America.  As part of a larger exhibition entitled Edition III, which includes work by contemporary muralists, graffiti artists, photographers, and others, the international sticker exhibition will be on display at Fresh Paint Gallery, Montréal, Québec, from December 2, 2011, through January 29, 2011.

Founded by Oliver Baudach in 2008, Hatch Kingdom began as a small gallery space in Berlin’s alternative Friedrichsain district to serve as a platform for stickers, sticker artists, skateboard fans, and collectors.  An expanded Hatch HQ is now located in central Mitte, with two gallery spaces devoted to Oli’s ever-growing sticker collection, now numbering well over 25,000 stickers, and one gallery for rotating exhibitions by young urban street artists.

Catherine directs St. Lawrence University’s art gallery in Canton, NY, and has been actively collecting stickers since 2003, having now collected over 6,000 original stickers by hand, primarily from Berlin and NYC, with stickers also from Hamburg, Munich, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cambridge (MA), Ottawa, Toronto, Amsterdam, Budapest, and other cities in western and central Europe.  Part of the collection is being digitized and can be found at SLU’s gallery Web site.  Catherine has presented papers at academic conferences for the College Art Association, the Visual Resources Association, and the International Arts in Society; in 2012, she will present a paper entitled “WTF.  It’s Only a Sticker” at the annual CAA conference in Los Angeles.  Check her Stickerkitty blog for more information.

The exhibition at Fresh Paint also includes six original drawings and collages from “Oversized and Underpriced,” a project initiated by Oliver Baudach in which artworks on oversized sticker printouts are sold at low prices with proceeds to benefit Skateistan, a skateboarding school in Kabul, Afghanistan, for young boys and girls.

In addition to art, music, and tagging stickers, political stickers in the exhibition from Germany and the U.S. focus on anti-authority, anti-capitalism, post-9/11 surveillance measures, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 US Presidential election, the environment, oil consumption, and the economy.  Examples of these were included in a recent gallery exhibition at St. Lawrence in 2010, which was based in part on a summer research grant from SLU’s Center for International and Intercultural Studies in which three students and an alumnus traveled to Berlin and Munich to study street art.