evo Gallery | Hired Hands exhibit July 3rd

We love art.  So much in fact that we also make it ourselves.  And we think some of it is actually pretty decent.  On July 3rd at evo we’re bogarting the Times Infinity Gallery to share some of our art with you.  Come check out this free event and see some of the hidden gems that evo has to offer. 

 What:    Hired Hands evo employee art exhibit

When:    Friday, July 3rd | 7-10pm

Where:   evo Times Infinity art gallery | 122 NW 36th St Seattle (Fremont)

Cost:     Free

Extracting Visions: An Interview with Nitro

NItro snowboards are rad. I was lucky enough to recently sit down with Nitro’s founders, part of the design team, their team manager, sales manager and our Northwest rep and figure out why. Now you can too.

“It seems like so long ago,” Mike says. He’s one of the designers at Nitro and he’s looking at the art for this year’s Eero on the gallery walls here at evo. The initial sketches are hung on the wall beneath the final graphic, which depicts a chaotic room strewn with boards, boots, cameras, books, pizza boxes, magazines. Front and center is a shaggy blond kid sitting at his computer with his back to us. The air is crowded with close up shots from the screen, speech bubbles compete for attention. It’s all IM conversations and photos of snowboarding, someone’s mohawk, friends, girls. At first glance, it’s a mess. But there’s more to it than that. You get a sense of what this kid is about and the jumble of his life translates to a sort of fervor for, well, snowboarding.

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evo hosts - Art Deck-o: Rivard Merges Skateboarding and Art

commentary by Bekah Grim

Abandon what you thought skateboard graphics could be—farewell kitschy skulls and a few predictable stars. Artist Mark Rivard has rescued skate design and has reinvented it with his original artwork. He’s amping up skate decks with everything from a two-years-in-the-making Breckenridge landscape to an organic blending of a women’s body with a tree—fine art and skateboarding have collided.

In celebration of Fremont’s First Friday Art Walk, evo’s Times Infinity art gallery debuted the opening of Mark Rivard’s feature gallery. The opening rocked steady with jams from DJ Grapenuts, and even Rivard himself was there to hang out, drink some free beer with the evo crowd and talk about his artwork. Incredibly, we learned Rivard has no formal artistic training. He began sketching on skate decks after a ski accident in ’03 left him wallowing on his mom’s couch. “I pretty much needed something to do and so I reached for a skate deck and starting drawing.” Rivard explained.

This artist has gone from injured to ingenious, sketching up his super-detailed skate deck magic with Sharpie markers. That’s right, Sharpies.

Several of Rivard’s pieces in the evo gallery include the artist’s free flow writings about life, liberty, and pursuit of skateboarding. When asked if the writings were poetry, Rivard just laughed: “I don’t consider it poetry. It’s just what I have to say. The piece Slow Beat came from a night of drinking.”

Rivard keeps it real when talking about his art, skipping out on the fancy “isms” and fine art snobberies. We’ll skip those too. Rivard’s deck art is what would happen if graffiti artist Banksy was a Siamese twin with the graphic designers at Imperial Motion. These skate decks are urban mindwarps, with skylines melting into faces and faces melting into crows. Rivard’s art is inventive; Fishing for Ugly goes underwater with a fish, while above the surface an emu peeks out. There just aren’t enough emus at art galleries these days.

For those of you who missed out on opening night’s free beer, chill vibes, and DJ Grapenut’s grooves, fret not; you can still take in the emu. Rivard’s decks will be displayed in evo’s gallery for the rest of the month.

Evo’s art gallery openings are a regular event held every first Friday of the month to debut the work of a feature artist. To find out about upcoming artists, check out evo.com.