Busacca Gallery

Carnival Graffiti Art Milk Bottle: Faustian Bargain Game" by folk artist Mike Shine Original art by graffiti artist Mike Shine: "Flotsam’s Wonder World" is an 8 1/2-inch-tall, hand-painted stencil graffiti piece on a three-dimensional yellow wooden milk bottle. The contemporary folk art painting features a carnival character head portrait with a green face, red hair, a cigarette, a top hat, and devilish features. The bottle is hand-signed in pencil and has a logo at the bottom of the bottle. Shine's work is inspired by carnivals and includes large-scale stencil murals. His art is created for people to enjoy on multiple levels—both superficially and in depth. He criticizes much of modern art for requiring specific contexts for interpretation, aiming instead for his own work to be universally understandable, transcending cultural and language barriers. Blending influences from lost carnivals, Nordic mythology, and hazy nostalgia, Mike Shine's eerie yet often light-hearted art has been featured in exhibitions with SFMOMA, Laguna Art Museum, and The Museum of Craft and Folk Art. His installations have been commissioned and collected worldwide. His mixed media pieces typically involve house paint on found objects like driftwood, buoys, carnival bottles, and ephemera. The art "opera" centers on a carnival ringleader named Flotsam, whom Shine considers his personal version of Mephistopheles. Shine’s projects encompass large-scale street murals, extensive installations, and performances, all unified by his mythical character creation, Dr. Pyotr Mastolf Ilyas (also known as Dr. Flotsam). Mastolf Ilyas represents Shine’s modern-day interpretation of Mephistopheles, portrayed as a centuries-old Eastern European carnival leader. The Mike Shine Show was a mix of Fastelavn carnival, a Threepenny Opera, and an interactive installation. Featuring carnival games and eerie clowns, Shine’s latest experience successfully brought back the fun and wonder of art to both parents and children—an impressive feat in the often stuffy atmosphere of museum settings. Shine draws inspiration from the philosophies of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as the operas of Richard Wagner. His diverse body of work is unified through his mythical character, Dr. Flotsam, which he developed by blending these influences. For millennia, Dr. Flotsam has been performing his carnivals, tricks in the woods, and other acts with his traveling medicine show. Essentially, he’s been collecting souls—a twisted take on the Faustian bargain.

Shine’s world is populated with carnival themes and sinister characters, remixed with nostalgic elements and spattered with Norse mythology, all blended together and spat out in a strangely bright, lighthearted cartoon-like fashion. Using a variety of mixed media and house paint to morph and construct the world around him, Shine often turns to found objects such as cast-off carnival ephemera, bottles, buoys, spent skateboards and oddly shaped driftwood. Some of his characters are also mechanized like the old school carnival attractions from yesteryear, bringing them to life right before your eyes. His influences can be easily be perceived throughout – Kubrick, Nietzsche, and Wolfgang von Goethe are all represented in some form or another. His “art opera” installation entitled Flotsam’s Wonder World is a beautifully evil culmination of all of these things, centering upon the carnival ringleader, Flotsam – his own manifestation of Mephistopheles – and has been included in exhibitions with SFMOMA, Laguna Art Museum and The Museum of Craft and Folk Art.