DREEM STREET
“The store is a temporary buildout that is supposed to look like our International headquarters in the top of a skyscraper in Hong Kong,” the artist Eric Mast told me over e-mail as a way to explain the pop-up that Dreem Street—the West Coast-based clothing company that Mast runs alongside the artist Matthew Chambers—is opening this Friday at Moiety in Brooklyn.
Although that Hong Kong space doesn’t actually exist, it provided Dreem Street with the conceptual framework to approach the project. “A normal retail space sounds boring, and we didn’t want to make it an ‘art show’ either, so we’re trying to transform the space into something that it isn’t,” Mast explained. “[It was] playing with the idea of our bad business sense, as if we did have a big office somewhere instead of operating out of our garage and basement.”
Dreem Street was created in 2009 and since then has made over 200 shirt designs. They are mostly black ink on white and have a nice and loose feel. “The process is very low-tech to facilitate as many designs and as few chemicals as possible,” Mast told me. “We hand-paint screens (no photo-emulsion or mechanical anything really), print a small run from home studios in Portland and Los Angeles, then reclaim the screen for the next design.”
Outside of the company, both artists have long and winding résumés. This year, Chambers staged a solo show at Zach Feuer in New York and has an upcoming exhibition at Praz Delavallade in Paris. Mast was a part of the Wyld File collective alongside Ben Jones, Jacob Ciocci, and Cory Arcangel, and this year had a solo show Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon.
The opening runs between 7 and 10 this Friday and will feature a DJ set from the great Jib Kidder.
As a bonus, watch the video for “Cool” by Wet Ones (a group Mast performs in with the musicians Bobby Birdman and White Rainbow) below. It features work from Dreem Street and was probably the best video of 2014.