“LETTERS from AMERICA” RISK, Ron English, SABER, and Trustocorp

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For Immediate Release Corey Helford Gallery 6/26/2012 presents Los Angeles, CA “LETTERS FROM AMERICA” RISK, Ron English, SABER, and TrustoCorp

SABER Celebrated graffiti and street artists from the US invade London for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games Opening June 30, 2012 Outdoor installations at the London Pleasure Gardens Gate 1, North Woolwich Rd, London Opening July 4, 2012 Gallery Exhibition at Black Rat Gallery Arch 461, 83 Rivington Street, London

Let the games begin! This summer, London celebrates the sport of art with the arrival of the United States’ most celebrated and prolific graffiti and street artists for “LETTERS FROM AMERICA.” Presented by Culver City-based Corey Helford Gallery, the project launches on June 30 with outdoor installations at the London Pleasure Gardens followed by a gallery exhibition at Shoreditch’s Black Rat Gallery on July 4.

The gateway to the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, the London Pleasure Gardens is a multi-platform, cultural destination that will host site-specific outdoor installations by legendary Los Angeles graffiti writer RISK, renowned street artist and master pop surrealist painter Ron English and guerrilla art collective TrustoCorp. They will be joined by art luminaries from around the world to salute the launch of the Pleasure Gardens.

-more- Highlights include: • Internationally-known for his bus installation at MoCA’s 2011 graffiti and street art survey “Art in the Streets,” RISK returns to the driver’s seat to vandalize a bus and the nose of a military bomber aircraft. • New York artist Ron English lands in London to paint a custom billboard. He adds, “Because water was such an integral part of the docklands site, I decided to make something that relates to the surrounding environment, while at the same time being palatable to a broad spectrum of attendees.” • TrustoCorp hits the ground to paint a largescale mural and series of signs that will be on view throughout the Pleasure Gardens.

“LETTERS FROM AMERICA” continues its UK invasion with an all-American Independence Day celebration on Wednesday, July 4 at Black Rat Gallery. The exhibition transforms the London tunnel into a bunker of America’s most wanted artists, showcasing new works from RISK, Ron English, SABER, and TrustoCorp. Gallerists Jan and Bruce Helford add, “Corey Helford Gallery is proud to be bringing U.S. artists to a UK project of this “Olympian” scale and finishing with a celebration of four of the top U.S. street and graffiti artists - RISK, Ron English, Saber and TrustoCorp - in a gallery that’s been home to some of the finest street artists in the world, Black Rat Gallery.”

The exhibition of paintings and sculptures will feature an original Bob’s Big Boy statue customized by RISK, as well as SABER’s famous flag series, which serves as a commentary about the National Healthcare System and his personal challenges with it. For the show, SABER will unveil first Union Flag piece, titled “The Flag Of The National Healthcare System.” “Quite literally, I paint for my life,” he says. “Every painting I touch, I try to envision my pieces on a travel into the future as a record of the great emotional value as well as artistic merit that can only be matched by someone living under such extreme conditions during these tumultuous times. I only hope that after I am gone, these pieces will be hung on the walls of a different era where we as nations care more about nurturing its citizens than perpetuating the system of profit over life.”

The opening reception for “LETTERS FROM AMERICA” at the London Pleasure Gardens is free and open to the public. Outdoor installations will be on view until December 2013. The opening reception at Black Rat Gallery is private and by invitation only. All of the artists will be in attendance on opening night, and the show runs through July 18, 2012.

“LETTERS FROM AMERICA” Press Information: London Pleasure Gardens Media Preview: Thursday, June 28, 10am - 12 noon Black Rat Gallery Media Preview: Wednesday, July 4, 9:30am Please contact Angelique Groh for press credentials and interview requests: [email protected] /T: 213.273.6373

Address: London Pleasure Gardens Gate 1 North Woolwich Rd London E16 2BS

Black Rat Gallery Through Cargo Garden Arch 461, 83 Rivington Street London EC2A 3AY

-more- Website: http://www.coreyhelfordgallery.com http://www.londonpleasuregardens.com http://www.blackratprojects.com Twitter: @coreyhelford Twitter: @blackratgallery Hashtag: #lettersfromamerica

RISK In a career spanning 29 years, RISK has impacted the evolution of graffiti as an art form in Los Angeles and worldwide. RISK gained major notoriety for his unique style and pushed the limits of graffiti further than any writer in L.A. had before: He was one of the first writers in Southern California to paint freight trains, and he pioneered writing on “heavens,” or freeway overpasses. At the peak of his career he took graffiti from the streets and into the gallery with the launch of the Third Rail series of art shows, and later parlayed the name into the first authentic line of graffiti inspired clothing. RISK has continued to work on numerous Hollywood projects for movie and music video sets, including the film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and videos for The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ice Cube, Bad Religion and Michael Jackson. Today, RISK is still involved with graffiti,and shows his work worldwide. In 2011, RISK was a featured artist in Jeffrey Deitch’s Art In the Streets, the first comprehensive museum survey of graffiti and street art. For more information about the artist, please visit riskrock.com.

Ron English One of the most prolific and recognizable artists alive today, New York-based painter and street artist Ron English has bombed the global landscape with unforgettable images, on the street, in museums, in movies, books, television, and album covers. In addition to his fine art painting, English is widely considered a cata- lytic figure in the advancement of street art away from traditional wild-style lettering and into clever statement and masterful trompe l’oeil based art. Creating illegal murals and billboards that blend stunning visuals with biting political, consumerist and surrealist statements, English has hijacked public space worldwide for the sake of art. Featured in the hit movies “Supersize Me” and “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” English has also made numerous television appearances worldwide. He is the subject of the 2006 award-winning documentary, “POPaganda, the Art and Crimes of Ron English” and the 2009 documentary “Abraham Obama.” His work resides in the permanent collections of Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACRO), Paris’ Museum of Modern Art, and others. He is prominently featured in every major book about Street Art and has produced several art books, including “Popaganda,” “Son of Pop,” “Abject Expressionism,” “Lazarus Rising,” and “Abraham Obama.” Ron English continues to create art that propels unstated cultural norms just beyond the bounds of comfort into a disconcerting realm simultaneously hilarious and terrifying.

TrustoCorp TrustoCorp is a New York based guerilla art group dedicated to highlighting the hypocrisy and hilarity of hu- man behavior. TrustoCorp targets areas in the public domain reserved for messages of trust and authority and subverts them with sarcasm and satire. With active agents all over the country, they send their messages by any means necessary; from street signs and supermarkets to shopping carts and billboards, nothing is off limits.

SABER Among the thousands of people who make up the graffiti community around the world, there are few names that carry the same legendary quality as SABER. SABER was already a fixture in the Los Angeles graffiti scene by 1997 when he completed the largest graffiti piece ever created. His piece on the sloping cement bank of the Los Angeles River was nearly the size of a professional football field, and took 97 gallons of paint and 35 nights to complete. SABER began exhibiting in his fine art in 2002. In October 2010, SABER released a video in which the year’s heated debate about health care was spray painted over the American flag. This work led SABER to create a large group of American flag paintings called the Tarnished series. In 2011, SA- BER’s solo show, The American Graffiti Artist opened in New York to great acclaim.

-more- Corey Helford Gallery Located in the Culver City Art District, Corey Helford Gallery was established in 2006 by Jan Corey Hel- ford and her husband, television producer and creator, Bruce Helford (Anger Management, The Drew Carey Show, George Lopez, The Oblongs). Corey Helford Gallery represents a diverse collection of Contemporary artists influenced by today’s pop culture, encompassing the genres of New Figurative, Pop Surreal, Graffiti and Street Art. Artists include Josh Agle (Shag), Ray Caesar, D*Face, Chloe Early, EINE, Ron English, Natalia Fabia, HUSH, Kukula, Lola, The London Police, Sylvia Ji, Eric Joyner, Michael Mararian, Brandi Milne, Buff Monster, Risk, Amy Sol, TrustoCorp, Martin Wittfooth, and Nick Walker. Renowned for its notable exhibitions, the gallery has presented “Charity By Numbers,” which was co-curated by Gary Baseman and featured an unprecedented lineup of artists including Mark Ryden, Marion Peck, Shepard Fairey, Todd and Kathy Schorr, Camille Rose Garcia, and Michael Hussar, as well as “La Noche de la Fusion,” an epic Carnivalesque festival and solo exhibition for Pervasive artist Gary Baseman. In 2010, Corey Helford Gallery partnered with Bristol’s City Museum & Art Gallery for the transatlantic collaboration “Art From The New World,” a world-class United Kingdom museum exhibition showcasing work by a formidable group of 49 of the finest emerging and noted American artists. Corey Helford Gallery presents new exhibitions approximately every four weeks. For more information and an upcoming exhibition schedule, please visit coreyhelfordgallery.com.

London Pleasure Gardens London Pleasure Gardens, a new urban oasis created from a former wasteland in London’s Docklands, is set to open its doors on the 30th of June 2012. Supported by local government and already boasting a bill of in- credible events across its pop-up venues and rolling outdoor spaces, the Gardens brings the best and bright- est of London art from beyond the gallery to mass audiences in the local community and beyond. The project is a brand new execution of a classic concept, based on the pleasure gardens created by Georgian Visionar- ies like the entrepreneurial Tyers family. Boasting a 35k capacity, purpose built venues, rolling open spaces, in house artists, bars, a pop-up hotel and a host of other beautiful madness, the Gardens provides the same thrills and spills as its predecessors with plenty of modern accoutrements on top. It is designed to drive local regeneration, create jobs, entertain residents, visitors and tourists and generally bring about a summer of cultural adventure the likes of which London has never seen.

Black Rat Projects Black Rat Projects was initiated in 2007 and has for the past four years been supporting and developing the careers of artists whose mediums and techniques are in many ways traditional yet whose practices are fused with a contemporary interventionist spirit. Our artists are many things but they have all been portrait painters, woodcutters, traditional screenprinters and etchers and we continue to mark their developments in drawing and painting with the prints we publish. Our editions can be found in collections worldwide including the Vic- toria and Albert Museum and the Tate Modern in the UK.

The gallery space, a large railway arch with bare brick walls in east London, has also become the place where our artists can experiment with large installation and multimedia projects. The gallery focuses on represent- ing both established and emerging contemporary artists. We also deal in secondary market works by a small number of international artists.

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