The Infectious design community creates cool device skins, adhesive wall art, and car decals, using the talents of artists such as Dalek, Tara McPherson, Shag and Junko Mizuno, among many others. To celebrate their new status as the home for Skate Deck Design Community, Popdeck, they are currently holding a contest to design the first five decks to be added to the Infectious catalog. There’s no theme and first place prize wins a recession-friendly $1000. Sweet.

SPONSOR

Andrew Davis (from AWWSWEET, a curating agency) has done it again: his second skateboard art show has made it all the way from Detroit to the Brooklyn-based art space, Third Ward. Inspired by the documentary feature film Beautiful Losers, which focuses on the subcultures of skateboarding and graffiti, Good Wood brings together 45 different artists who’ve designed a stunning selection of decks. Styles range from collage, graffiti, acrylic, oil, ink, silkscreen and photography to sculpture. Some of the big players in the show include Chuck Anderson, Nathan Fox, Leo Espinosa, and myself, amongst many others.

Davis, the originator and curator of the exhibition, recently graduated from Detroit’s College for Creative Studies with a major in illustration. His first Good Wood show debuted exactly a year ago. I caught up with Andrew at the gallery yesterday to find out more about how this came about: “I thought of it because I saw that many artists were making their names through skateboarding; it also gave me a good excuse to reach out to artists I admired and establish a solid network for future shows I plan to curate.” Davis provided the canvas — the decks — and the artists provided the work, which made artists more receptive to his proposal. This year’s version of Good Wood continues that trend.

Stop by the opening at Third Ward this Saturday, July 26, between 7 pm and midnight, where you can check out some short films by Josh Stewart, dance to DJ Brion Isaacs’s music, have a drink or two, and buy a deck to help a good cause. The show will be up until August 10th.

Some of the things artist Jan Willem Wennekes likes are critters, monsters, colour, simplicity, complexity, sketchbooks, street-art, skateboards, fairtrade, music, coffee, t-shirts, boardsports and philosophy. He studied the latter before deciding to take up illustrative design and his one-man studio, Zeptonn Lab, has a clear signature style which is creatively applied to design t-shirts, posters, logos button badges and books. [see also the illustrations of Jason Allsebrook]