project

Nicky Gaston – artist feature

I discovered the works of Redwood City based artist, Nicky Gaston the year of 2007 in skate works through some close friends of Jason Strubing and mine. I became really interested in him not just as a skateboarder, but learning that he had more talents than one. He was not just a skateboarder, but also a skateshop manager as well as an artist. When I skate with him he seems to barge everything and give it his all. Its like he does that with everything and has amazing energy that people can feed off of.

Rampenlicht Project – Berlin

The first phase of the project begins with the construction of the focal piece: a triangular skateboard ramp, which will be extracted from its ‘natural’ environment and modified to serve a different purpose than originally intended. It will be a symbol of harmony within the collective, and at the same time a symbol of disharmony within today’s society. It is representative of the main topic of the exhibition and will therefore be the central point of the happenings.Around this piece of carpentry, the collective will create an atmosphere that opposes a dystopian, exaggerated reality with a surreal dreamlike utopia. Various forms of contemporary art, such as painting, videography, photography, sculpture, installation, etc., will be used to reach this goal.

Praca Duó Project, Rio de Janeiro

Mattias Nylen is a gnarly bowl and vert skater who works part time building concrete parks in Sweden. He recently flew down from Malmö, Sweden to Rio de Janeiro and has been renovating the Praca Duó Project, currently with a “shark fin”. “My friend Fabio in Rio showed me his local bowl which was super slow with some weak mellow trannies and asked if we could do something about it. So we built a vert extention and it turned out really nice but we still didn’t have much speed to hit it so we decided to build a taco thing to carve and pick up speed for the extention. While we put up the bricks for the structure we took a break had some beers and I got the idea, “let’s make a hip on it so we can still carve it.” So what was gonna be a taco tuned into a sharks fin. It was real hard work with very basic tools, all hand mixed but a lot of locals helped out, even the tranvestite street whores wanted to help mixing hahahaha. The thing works well and is real fun. If you are in Rio go to Praca Duó in Barra da Tijuca. Check it out!”