Hasta La Ideas

Singer and musician Devendra Banhart‘s latest project, an art show at Half Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, could easily be likened to a visual mixtape of sorts, with a tracklist featuring musicians Fabrizio Moretti, Kevin Long, and Banhart himself, among a handful of other artists and designers.

Called “A Ways A Way,” the show features a miscellany of works and various mediums that, despite their randomness, reveal often-surprising glimpses into their maker’s talents. Moretti, for example, best known for being the drummer for the NYC-based band The Strokes, invokes his less-publicized art school education with his pencil and paper diptych “Anonymous Portrait.” (Pictured below.)

Banhart also comes from an art school background; he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and has exhibited work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as at the Center for Fine Arts, Brussels. His contribution to the show included a piece from his recent desert-colored series of gouache and pencil eyes. (Pictured bottom left.)

Hot on the heels of his own solo show at Soho’s OhWow gallery, tattoo artist Scott Campbell continues his play on and with money, creating a butterfly-shaped bas relief of laser-cut dollar bills. Other featured artists also tend to the younger fixtures of the NY art scene, like Megan Marrin, who adapted an old French armor-making method known as “cuir-bouilli” to create her leather and glass-fused “Painting Without Paint.”

San Francisco, CA-based artist Keegan McHargue, on the other hand, whose sculpture—fashioned from chocolate, plastic, cloth and Goyard—rounds out Banhart’s motley crew. (Pictured top right.)

“A Ways A Way” runs through 8 July 2010.