Spin Cycle

Careful steering and a focus on future horizons will get us there, careful not to spin out! Every difficult turn is an opportunity to encounter a higher potential path. Spin cycle is an icon for staying present, transcending habitual cycles and discovering the beauty in it all. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and grow into the future!

Crypto assemblages is an expansive series of Digital Sculptural Assemblages. Each assemblage becomes a new icon representing the great ideals, perfections, and challenges we overcome; leading to our greatest accomplishments. In a sense, they carry talismanic properties as a constant reminder of our own unlimited potential and ability to create divine possibility through our approach to the world.

     Crypto Assemblage’s are created through a combination of 3D scanning, hand made VR sculpture, and digital junk. Through Ori Carino, the works stem from the LES’ history of junk art and found object art, and bring them to the surface, in the digital sphere, without limitation, without gravity, and without greedy landlords. Each crypto Assemblage is a world within a world that deepens the connection between the physical world and Digital space/time. They are icons for the emergence of ideas in the digital space that form tangible experiences for us all. Carino is working with the leading VR and AR specialist, Mehow Skalski, on creating these unique works. 
 
   Ori Carino and Mehow Skalski scour the streets of New York and beyond, 3D scanning the unknowable landmarks that become a part of our familiar path and yet disappear without a trace. Whether it’s a cart chained to a pole next to an iconic store, or the charming furniture sitting on the corner where the old ladies play cards, they are part of our cultural landscape, and we wish to memorialize and elevate them to a new state of existence through our work. As part of the assemblage process, Ori Carino’s physical studio art practice is incorporated, as he builds, assembles, and airbrushes paintings to be 3D scanned for the pieces. All of this is combined with 3D scans of important historical objects and relics. Each new work expands to profound new potentials through this process, and our connection to meta art practices deepens with every step. 

“I grew up around a group of wild and dedicated artists in in the Lower East Side 1980s, a rich diverse community in downtown Manhattan, NYC; there was Toyo Tsuchiya and the Rivington School, Kwok Mang Ho and his shit show, Tehching Hsieh and his one year performances, Arleen Schloss and her 99 nights at No Se No, and so many others.  I grew up playing in Rivington School’s giant assemblage of junk sculpture, welded steel, and paint on Rivington Street, where they transformed the Detritus of the city into a wild fantasy of creativity. It was my field of wheat!            

  These artists were representing inclusivity at its greatest,  pronounced not as anarchy but as a complete artistic ideal in action. They shaped the cultural landscape of the downtown underground scene and created a post Dadaist outsider art movement with assemblage found object sculptures, site specific painting and installation, and ground breaking performance art. With my crypto assemblage project and nft work as a whole, I wish to bring the energy of this multidisciplinary, expressive and profound art practice to the digital sphere. 
    
 As far back as I can remember, my mind was full of daydreams of assemblages of seemingly disparate objects to form new archetypes; metal, steel, and carved concrete, discarded products and trash, to form objects of profound beauty. I would lean out my bedroom window looking at the city street, daydreaming Flashes of artists like Kazuko Miyamoto hanging oversized kites high from rooftops, Ken Haratsuka carving the sidewalk as I watched, the performance artists and Toyo Tsuchiya’s incredible site specific photo art. My childhood home was Toyo’s gallery,  named after my brother Tobe, in a loft on Houston street. Everything I am as an artist comes from that time. 
 For my fifth birthday party, Toyo covered the walls with paper so I could graffiti everywhere; it makes sense my first paintings were on lower east side buildings. Performances in our apartment were frequent, and exhibitions hung, along with assemblages and found objects of all types. Crowds of people frequently huddled and watched these performances of dynamic, conceptual, expressive underground art, in our living space. Toyo’s photos continue to be my talismans from this era, a constant reminder of real and rare art. I used them as source imagery for years and years as a young teen spraying walls (and now I am the director of his estate). It was all piles and assemblages, combinations, parades, processions, unity, and performance; It made me what I am, I was raised to be an artist and this is how it was done. 

I spent a full year considering my approach to the digital art space and it has become a true reflection of my history and the history of those before me. I am so excited to share it with all of you, and grow with you all into the future. “
                                                              -Ori Carino