Stewed, screwed and tattooed: highly stylized lowbrow art

Work by Johnny Crap at SCREWED

This ain’t your average gallery’s fine art, folks.

The intricately detailed and highly stylized artwork of Florida’s Hydro74 and Montreal’s Meka and Jonathan Bergeron (aka Johnny Crap) is firmly rooted at the intersection of skate, motorcycle, horror, tattoo, hot rod and music subcultures. And, lucky for you, it’s going up on the walls of Espace OTH tomorrow.

Curator and organizer Yanick Blanchet (Beans & Bacon) says the art show, SCREWED, came together fairly organically.

“I met Hydro at a convention […] when he mentioned that he really likes Johnny Crap’s work,” Blanchet says. He’d mentioned wanting to come to Montreal to do a show, and voilà — the concept for SCREWED was born.

It wasn’t a stretch of the imagination for Blanchet, who has organized a number of unconventional art shows like Press Start, an homage to old school video games, as well as designer toy-related events.

Originally meant to be part of this weekend’s Montreal Art Tattoo Show, SCREWED’s going it alone instead. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be seeing Montreal’s tattoo world’s top brass circulating Espace OTH — that crowd’s a bunch of vultures for well-made lowbrow art at good prices, and these artists are kind of a big deal. ■

SCREWED opens Thursday, Sept. 6 at Espace OTH (1181 Ste-Catherine W. — above Foot Locker), 7 p.m., free entry. The first 25 visitors will get a screenprint of the show poster, and other contests will be running in partnership with sponsors. The show will run evenings and weekends over the month of September.

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