Graffoto Blog. . .

Panik - Changing Faces

2009-11-07T00:21:00.017Z

5 Nov – 28 Nov 2009
Sartorial Gallery, London

Panik atg aka Mr P (and now – also known as Jack Murray) has been a feature of London streets for a decade or so, currently as a key member of ATG and formerly as a member of the now defunct London Frontline.

His second solo show this year has opened at Sartorial Art Gallery in the small project space which was previously earmarked as Tek’s Writer’s Bench space.

As a bomber Panik has a pretty impressive ability to access rooftops and various other walls.

As a painter, Panik rocks a highly coloured a tribal geometric style tending towards a cubism with acid colours vibe.

Untitled

There are three larger canvasses, of which this gorgeous Basquiat influenced work blew the eyeballs off my face.

Free n Easy

The earlier show at Pure Evil gallery was characterised by a couple of nuggets surrounded by a large degree of untamed chaos, consisting primarily of the Panik dub at manageable canvas scale, this show is a far more accomplished artistic achievement and confirms Panik’s ability to leave the large scale street stuff behind and produce “art”. Having become accustomed to many recent shows incorporating pieces which the artists failed to sell last time out (which actually is a blessing, remember the bad old days when you walked into the PV to find every piece of shit had a red dot), it is also a relief to find that apart from one editioned print everything here is new (or at least, wasn’t shown in the Pure Evil gallery show).

Take Time To Dream

More pics of Changing Faces art here

Tinsel Edwards, Twinkle Troughton, Meter Maids!

2009-11-03T23:02:00.007Z

Irate motorists in Shoreditch and Hoxton took a hammering last Thursday as a blizzard of parking tickets were issued in a blitz on cars in the area. The usual sealed sellophane wrappers warned that it was illegal for any one other than the driver of the vehicle to remove the ticket.

While on a lunch break constitutional Graffoto caught un-expectedly up with a pair of wardens leading the onslaught on parking in the area. From behind there was something familiar and saucy about the cascading black hair, the seamed stockings and the red stilettos and catching up our suspicions were confirmed.

It was Twinkle Troughton and Tinsel Edwards dressed to kill as meter maids – pulses raced I can tell ya, if only real traffic wardens looked like this.

The very realistic cellophane wrappers turned out to contain not a ticket but a limited edition signed piece of mini art titled “It Was The Best Of Times, It Was The Worst Of Times”, featuring a closed UK high street institution, Woolworths.

Loss of jobs, industries and insecurity are a wide-spread reality for millions caught in the recession fall-out yet one senses a ray of hope in Twinkle adn Tinsel's sentiments, a possibility that within the recession people do find the inner reserves to rebuild, recover and grow. Out of the negative coming a positive.

Imagine the shifting emotions of a driver thinking they’d picked up a parking fine only to find they’d actually been gifted a piece of free street art. Again, out of a negative coming a positive.

So there you have it, Twinkle and Tinsel make an event of giving out free art, cheer up at least two wandering wage slaves (Graffoto doesn’t run on fresh air you know) and throw around complex ideas about emotional polarities into the bargain.

Heavy Artillery - Haters

2009-10-28T21:58:00.019Z

Prescription Art Gallery
Brighton, England
22 Oct 2009 -

all photos: NoLionsInEngland

Heavy Artillery, awesome top end graffiti writers have opened their first whole crew show in Prescription Art’s gallery in Brighton. This show takes place in a distressed and dilapidated former music library with scene-of-the-crime tripod lighting, unlit external toilets and no running water, so a graff crew is bound to feel comfortable.

Heavy Artillery Haters

The derelict feel and distressed textures of the large single room floors and cavernous basement create an ideal ambience for graffiti art. Upon entering at ground level the first explosion of colour and elaborate writing comes from three floor to ceiling pieces by Giroe, Gary and Roid. Giroe and Gary look more or less exactly as they would on a street wall, a crisp clean riot of colour.

Giroe - large piece on multiple canvas matrix

Roid’s writing outdoors takes the law of the letter and throws the law away, deconstructing the alphabet to the point of virtual illegibility to all but the most tutored eyes so it is a surprise that for this indoor show he has gone for a less wild word form, making the lettering more legible whilst setting them against a backdrop belching comic style smoke trails.

Gary, Roid – large pieces on multiple canvas matrix

Roid

Another bit of Heavy Artillery info, there are twelve members of the HA crew, 9 of them have work in the show – Alert, Rench and Relay missing. Upstairs the standout piece is a combined mural and installation by HA’s friend INSA. Its centrepiece is a dulled down version of the chrome arse from his “Looking For Love In The Wrong Places” show set into a circular black and white vortex flanked on either side by female posteriors , each caressed by a hand whose nail paint features a mash-up of the classic INSA pink, black and white stripy heels, a pair of which adorned a suitably willowy lady enjoying the show. INSA has enjoyed a trigonometric exercise by creating a visually complete circle drawn across a floor and ceiling each intersecting a half cylinder recess, a interesting multi-dimensional draughting challenge.

INSA – Live The Dream, Feel The Magic

Giroe, aka Jiroe in the world of graff which encourages writers to vary the spelling of their name for greater opportunity to play with letters, has created a multi-media portrait which is mainly spray painted on the wall but the eyes are light up by swirling projected fractals, whilst the teeth change colours in a way that would have dentists taking up drugs. Very psychedelic.

Giroe

Gebes has done the half-height burner on wall and integral canvasses thing, several of the canvasses are filled-in outside the graff outline with fuzzy coloured strips, a motif which re-occurs in Gebes more abstract – give or take the occasional inter-galactic astral carrot - canvasses.

Gebes

Gebes

In the basement HA crew are a touch more focussed on art created for canvas rather than across it. That said, Storm has a graff styled “S” with a faded fill and “Heavy As” tag on canvas which almost looks as if it might have been surgically extracted from a full Storm dub. If graff elements in your home is your thing then this or two other canvasses with HA tags might be picked up for only slightly more than the original release cost of a TOX print.

Storm "S"

Mr Wany has contributed three diminutive canvasses each featuring a single surreal character that share a pinched face appearance with characters often featured Mr Wany’s external walls. Letters are woven into the work both visibly and also in a very subliminal way deeply disguised in the paint, the lettering is so light it has the appearance of vestigial remnants of painted over previous work on the same canvas.

Mr Wany Red Line/W Lion/Alien God

One end of the cellar consists of a dirty wild urban graff tableau created by Odisy complete with discarded cans on the floor, picture the crazy archaeology of colours you get on an illegal wall built up from generations of throwies, tags and characters, all of which can be made out in the aerosol mix. Four large portraits on canvas blend into this backdrop but have been hung tilted from the ceiling about 2 feet forward from the background – Odisy wants to separate his art from the graff.

Odisy

Stepping back from the work reveals the characters as actually integral with the mural behind. The secrets of Odisy’s art alter ego, Alex Young are really kept close to the chest in this show with only one example of his pointilist style tucked away two floors up between INSA and Gebes.

At the opposite end of the cellar, one of the highlights of the show displayed on a rough mural featuring an assortment of his characters are the decks, canvasses and paintings on found materials contributed by Nylon, the second non HA writer and artist to be honoured with an invitation to share the HA love. A particular favourite for its rich colours, heavy paint and rough surface texture is Zulu. In the flickr show set (link below) is another pic showing the lush surface finish to better effect.

Nylon – Zulu

Nylon - deck

Twesh has been full on writing his name on a basement wall in his usual catenary style with outrageous variations in the proportions of his letters, taking one example the word stretches to scratch three canvasses, one pair, a diptych just about embrace a fragment of the “T”, the other feeds off an apparent explosion of particles (Structure 01.mb) blowing into a graphic of modernist architecture.

Twesh

The crowning touch in both sets of canvasses is Twesh’s calligraphy, written in diagonal layers, its curvaceous beauty is almost the diametric opposite to the wanton indecipherability of the graffiti’d name they spring from.

Twesh – detail

Prescription Art has a spectacular space in Brighton with perfect run-down grandeur for graffiti art shows and on all three floors the artists have made great use of the architectural nooks and crannies.

Roid, Aroe

The previous HA show at prescription Art in August was dominated by over sized graffiti names done over a wall and canvass melange and I had hoped to see more of the art skills of these graffiti writers, all of them are accomplished artists outside the graffiti genre. A large burner across a set of canvasses rarely results in anything other than crude fat cap abstracts whose individual composition is almost entirely an accident of positioning within the piece rather any particular artistic intention. Maybe the randomisation is a valid artistic device in itself but there is little doubt that this wasn’t meant as a significant conceptual exercise. Where the crew – and friends – have got out the acrylics and other materials the results have generally been exciting, it would have been great to have seen more of this.

Storm (word and cockerel), Gebes

The show is one for fans of graff and is a lot better for not behaving like it needs to create converts, when graff gets evangelical it tends to castrate itself and make tame, crowd-pleasing adjustments, thankfully Heavy Artillery haven’t felt the need to go down that route. The show title itself comes across almost as a challenge, you hate us and we don’t care.

INSA Heels (models own)

The un-even localised gallery lighting makes photographing this shit a bit tricky, it’s pretty certain that the colours showing up in the flicks are probably not the colours you would see with the naked eye in daylight.

Regrettably with a lot to gas on about this ended up too long to include relevant street pieces. Check out a big collection of the HA street work on Heavy Artillery’s crew flickr.

7th Letter (AWR/MSK crews aka Graffiti Gods, Roid and Aroe are members)

Likewise, Nylon’s stuff here. INSA has a website yer. Finally, this write up contains more photos of HA pieces that it does the art work, check my show flicks here for some more HA art.

Keep 'Em Peeled. . . Or Don't As The Case May Be

2009-10-21T10:27:00.008+01:00

As that eternal twat Shaw Taylor used to tell us back in days gone by, onto another twat that needs to be kept an eye out for and had some polite words with.

From Flickr friend eddiedangerous http://www.flickr.com/photos/eddiedangerous comes this annoying story of street art theft - seemingly no one is safe, but currently hardest hit is the currently most active streeter - Mr Kid Acne.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eddiedangerous/4029576457

Follow through to eddies picture on Flickr for the current discussion taking place, am sure it will grow - but this guy seriously needs a word or two in his shell-like to maybe tell him that we do appreciate it, and we mostly appreciate it being left where it is thank you very much!

For more pics of how great the recent batch of Acne "stabby girls" looked, view my Flickr pics here, Nolions pics here and the Kid Acne Flickr pool here.

Miss Van – Lovestain

2009-10-05T22:53:00.008+01:00

Stolen Space, Old Truman Brewery, London
1 – 18 October 2009

all photos: NoLionsInEngland except W10 where noted

Miss Van - Lovestain

In a year which has seen fewer significant international street artists coming to grace the walls of London’s grittier galleries it is a relief to find a major artist prepared to stage a large scale show. Miss Van is renowned for the coquettish femine figures she calls her dolls or “poupees” and throughout this vast exhibition she doesn't scrimp with these gorgeous sultry beauties.

Miss Van - Lovestain

Sightings of authentic Miss Van originals are rare on the London streets and thus far, sadly, no sightings of new street Miss Vans have been recorded. This one from Ladbroke Grove goes back a few years, thanks to W10 for the flick.

Miss Van – Ladbroke Grove c. 2003 - photo W10 (thanks)

Lovestain is partly retrospective and partly new 2009 material and is presented within two separate spaces in the same block within the Old Truman Brewery. The new Lovestain material is in the smaller permanent Stolen Space venue.

There seem to be a couple of recently new twists to the Miss Van style. The first development introduces the rather uncertain show title; a collection of images of pious, angelic and saintly females have been modified to look like clowns, each piece called an Inmaculada. Throughout the retrospective, none of the pieces shown are anything other than 100% Miss Van creations whereas a significant portion of the new material works on an existing image from some other source. An IMmaculada is a Spanish Catholic reference to the virgin Mary’s immaculate conception or, in the more literal interpretation of the Spanish devotion, “without stain”. The English prefix IN quite often in English conveys a sense of negative and opposite, think incapable versus capable, so Miss Van seems to be setting up her show to represent the opposite of the immaculate conception, a celebration of physical love. And you thought it referred to something disgusting didn’t you.

Inmaculada

Anyone else seeing Gene Simmonds in there? The subversion of religious imagery is taken even further in the bastardisation of a religious relief of Virgin Mary, and in this one the Miss Van-isation becomes almost sinister

Inmaculada statue

The second twist is that Miss Van has taken the circus elements seen in the 2008 series “Still A Little Magic” and morphed her poupees into clowns. Not clowns in gay, cheerful make –em laff mode but the sad eyes behind the smile kind of real-clown.

Lovestain 2

Obviously a pretty female remain a pretty female no matter what her mood and the most recent Miss Van poupees have been painted with a darker and meaner disposition yet without losing that femme fatale appeal. The lips are smeared in thick clown make-up a la Robert Smith but the puckering has collapsed and distorted into a snarl. Like the aloof but beautiful Goths you couldn’t approach at school, you can take one of these a beauty like this home but you know she’ll be a silent ice maiden, she’ll sniff at your interior decor, she’ll be expensive and she won’t get on with your friends but you’ll be her slave for life if you can possess her.

Lovestain 7

Present but not as prominent in as in previous work are the flaming straw coloured waterfalls of hair. Although mainly tied up in bobs or hidden under hats, the one instance in the new work where the hair is big, floaty and flaming it becomes a major factor in making Lovestain 5 the show-stopping painting it is, a single melancholy masqued pas-joyeuse sits with a fox to her left and a halo of candles but the hair sets a gorgeous golden tone to the painting and provides the contrast for highlighting for the milkiness of the breasts straining the harlequin corset. Whilst at some point the inner perve was bound to emerge, you’ll observe that no link is being made between the candle flame and the wax candle images and any symbolic connection to the show title. None.

Lovestain 5

Lovestain Retrospective

The retrospective part of the show picks up Miss Van’s story from 2003 with about 40 paintings on canvas and wood as well as a couple of installations. This larger space has hugely un-forgiving top to bottom windows on two sides and the consequence is that the space is a bit un-forgiving for laying out (even Downey’s street sign sputnik looked pretty lost and awkward in the vast truman brewery pampas)

The earliest female figures are less three dimensional, the hair hasn’t become the yellow abundance of the last few years and eyes are part open, almost suggesting an alluring flutter of the eyelids.

Untitled 64 – 2003

In more recent times, the figures acquire a more solid form, colours take a richer deeper hue, the hair becomes hugely significant and in almost all paintings post 2006 the eyes are closed and smudged. Animals appear in the composition, often conventionally as a companion, occasionally as guardians and even as possibly mythical or fantasy based symbolisms.

Flaming Bird 1 – 2007

The fox makes recurs in many on the later retrospective pieces though there is a period through 2007 where the female figures become inter-twined with skulls of horned beasts, both in the canvasses and on a trio of paintings on leather

untitled on leather – 2007

With many of the animals, though they look at first glance like either a fem-warriors battle headdress or dead animal stole, there is something sexual about the way the animals cover and embrace the women, so much so that the viewer is invited to speculate that the animals actually symbolise the male of the species.

Fox Hair – 2006

A significant installation Entering an almost enclosed changing screen under an hanging chandelier draped in flaxen hair, the observer is surrounded by voluptuous semi naked long haired beauties each bearing a single candle, their eyes downcast, they watch over the observer. It is impossible for a man to pick fault with this.

every changing screen should be like this

A retrospective involves dicing with fortune, danger lurks, will people hark back to days when the artist was fresh, vital and bristling, will any particular period be found wanting. No problem with Miss Van though, her style and quality are remarkably consistent and she retains in every painting a subtle but erotically charged appeal. If only she could have painted something on the streets.

Obviously with so much material on display the pictures here are only a fraction of the show, there is a fuller photo set of the new Lovestain material here and there are a lot more pictures of the retrospective part of the show here

Keep It Crap. . . A.K.A Councils Are Bullies!

2009-09-25T14:06:00.010+01:00

Further to last weeks premature death of the Brick Lane hall of fame that had started and allowed to continue after the Meeting of Styles event this year, word has reached the Graffoto news desk of underhanded tatctics by Hackney Council in trying to bully shopkeepers into having graffiti cleaned from their shutters.

A Shoreditch shop owner has this week received a letter from the council stating, with somewhat imposed authority that "he must paint his shutter within 14 days of this notice, or legal proceedings will begin" - thankfully he told them to take a long walk off a short plank and is standing his ground, but how many others have received the letter and will believe it to be official, and just paint the shutters out as quickly as posssible? Hopefully not many.

After all, it's not like it's an eyesore:

Whilst it isn't believed that the two are connected - being that Brick Lane falls under Tower Hamlets Council, who to date have been slightly more leanient and forward thinking in their approach to graff and street art (they surveyed local residents and business owners as to whether the art should be allowed to stay) It does leave a bitter taste in the mouth that councils, or housing corporations feel that they can bully people into submission and somehow agree with their small minded belief that buffing these walls and shutters actually makes the place any better.

A word from Bristol graff artists is what's needed here (after the council buffed a LEGAL WALL):

Banksy Self Assembly Flat Pack Graffiti Slogans

2009-09-20T12:44:00.005+01:00

photos: Romanywg and Nolionsinengland where stated

Banksy appears to be getting the limitations of a formal show out of his system by going back to decorating street walls. First the M40 Bandit appeared a couple of weeks ago and is generally accepted to be Banksy although no "official" confirmation has been made.

Westway bandit, Nolionsinengland

Now, a very nice stencil has surfaced in Croydon and thanks are due to our friend Romanywg for this pic, there's nothing beats going out on a graff hunt and Mr R spent over two hours and made two trips down to Croydon before finding the right wall.

Flat Pack Anarchist, Romanywg

Stylistically this looks like classic banksy and we've seen versions of the anarchist punk before in "Don't Forget Your Scarf Dear" from the Bristol show.

Banksy vs Bristol Museum, Nolionsinengland

Banksy is noted more than most for his placement and use of the environment, it’s hard to see the full context from the pic here but apparently it is close to the Croydon shop-in-a-barn-on-the-outskirts IKEA. With a nod to someone off a forum for the research, apparently IKEA in Canada jumped on the guerrilla marketing bandwagon and hired an agency to go out and spray un-authorised advertising on walls using, errrrrrrrrrr, “chalk paint”. So Banksy hits two birds with one stone in this piece – convenience weekend anarchists and the appropriation of street cool by mega multi-national corporate.

Romanywg

No obvious explanation for the “IEAK” spelling, Graffoto certainly doesn’t subscribe to the theory that Banksy is afraid of breaching trademarks. I’d like to think Banksy has suffered the living hell that is Ikea’s Returns Desk and this is his jest at how often IKEA stuff is defective.

Some Assembly Required, Romanywg

Some have said this lacks the sense of "Banksy spectacular" but Banksy is fundamentally a street cartoonist and this is up to his usual standards. If spectacular means CCTV Nation or the Pollard St line painter then give me these illegal (guessing) ones any day.

As an aside, K-Guy also had a pop at the homogenisation and corporatisation of art as flogged by Ikea, described here.

And just in case you hadn't heard, Banksy did a popular show in Bristol this Summer, the Graffoto review is here and the Graffoto guide, which like everything else in Graffoto is of immense historical importance but actually bugger all use today, is here.

CEPT - A Frozen Explosion

2009-09-05T19:30:00.015+01:00

The Writer's Bench
26 Argyll Square,
Kings Cross
London

3 Sep - 25th Sep, Thurs-Sat 1.30pm til 6pm or by appointment.

Last time we met Cept, he was a cackling mad-man “I’m free; no more shows; painting streets...”.

Cept, DScreet, Mighty Mo, Jeff Soto, even some Conor Harrington remnants

So, a few months on here we are at Cept’s second solo show of 2009 and third in less than 12 months, marking the opening of new gallery The Writers' Bench, housed within the Sartorial Art gallery space in Kings Cross and curated by TEK33, BC. Although the proverbial cat would come to grievous gyratory-inflicted harm in this tight basement space, Cept has managed to cram in loads of canvasses, a couple of wall murals, a floor painting and a split screen TV looped audio visual multi media experience.

The key painting to grasping the threads of inter-galactic supreme beings, mind control, superheroes, and deviants in the machine is a single oil painting of a mutant galactic being formed of the cosmos or perhaps forming the cosmos. Creator or created of? There is a knowing nod to the iconography of Ganesha in the way the gas mask tubing comes to resemble and elephant trunk.

90% Of You Is Me

Somewhat curiously this image stands out for being stylistically as well as physically quite a distance from the rest of the show.

This galactic omniprescence sends messages to the minds of the sentient beings inhabiting the universe, strong black and white perspective lines link this source to the messages, presented in the form of tightly grouped words and messages on canvasses, “Not Everyone Thinks Like You”, “Bad Meaning Good”, “Art but Casual” - throw-away, individually meaningless but all quite sinister looked at from the conspiracy theorist’s point of view.

Under the stairs leading down to the basement is an audio-visual installation, a split screen presents on one side an excerpt from George Lucas’ first film THX-1138, a state controlled production line worker receiving electronic re-calibration and indoctrination after attempting to subvert the central control, his eyes rolling up in their sockets, while on the right is a visual white noise where subliminal CEPT words appear from time to time. The terse American voice issuing instructions and commands provides the soundtrack for the installation and recalls the audio backing to the illusion room at the 2007 Cept v. Mike Ballard show in Dalston (reviewed here).

THX-1138 (not turned on - HAN - stick a pic in here mate)

The TV loops then throws the idea of indoctrinating the rebel back across the room to the Supervillain on the wall opposite, his eyeless face reflecting the rolled back eyes of THX-1138 as Supervillain is also subjected to mind control messages from the galaxy creator.

Supervillain

The forth wall shows a couple of the Explosion oils which haven’t been seen in London before (read the review of Galaxy Rays– the Bristol 2009 show here) and a bit of wild and funky larking around the letter C.

If the galaxy creator/controller is to blame for 90% of us, then Cept has found a strong and consistent technique for releasing for his own unique 10 per cent. Like his last 2 shows, “Cept – A Frozen Explosion” very strong on concept, coherently linked the various strands across the work and not least, the artwork itself retains the rich and glossy pop feel.

More photos of the show, including the individual canvasses can be seen here, and you now have permission to leave this page and experience Graffoto's take on Cept's Dalston show from last year and Cept's Galaxy Rays show in Bristol from Spring 2009.

Banksy v. Bristol Museum

2009-08-29T16:52:00.016+01:00

Bristol
June 13 - Aug 31 2009

Photos: Nolionsinengland, Howaboutno, Art Of The State, Shellshock

Banksy is a bloke from Bristol who leaves messages on the streets and in Museums, you may have heard.

Banksy In London; Nolionsinengland

He is more than just my favourite cartoonist, even though he doesn’t have a daily newspaper slot yet, he is immensely popular which explains why 2 months into the Banksy vs Bristol Museum show the queue is 500+ queue long with more than an hour until the doors open. True to the myth, Banksy does things his own un-conventional way, in this case he has colluded with a few staff at the museum to give his hometown a monster of a show with virtually no pre-opening publicity and even most staff remained un-aware up until the week of the opening.

The show is mainly new material, though most of it works by reprising themes from many prior phases of Banksy’s modern era career, from an echo of the Natural History museum stuffed rat, the modified masterpieces of the Crude Oils/Barely Legal period, modern interpretations of classical sculptures (Crude Oils/Cans Festival) and the bulk of the New York 2008 Village Petstore animatronics show. Confession time, Banksy made up some of the caption for the pictures here, Graffoto made up the rest, it's not clear which are which.

Animatronics Room; photo Howaboutno

Three rooms plus the entrance foyer in the museum/gallery are exclusively and explicitly Banksy’s. The first contains a burnt ice cream van with the melted ice cream cone surrounded by various sculptural figures; the second room contains his paintings and a compact reconstruction of his Studio, whilst the third uses a zoo cage format to house the animatronics. Other than those dedicated spaces the rest of the museum is sprinkled with Banksy’s covertly (for sake of the legend, let’s pretend) inserted artifacts and paintings. A comprehensive guide to the show written by Graffoto contributor shellshock can be found in an earlier blog post ‘ere.

Ice Cream, Statues; Howaboutno

Banksy tilts against many windmills but by skilfully taking the side of the righteous common man at all times he doesn’t make enemies. Subjects teased by the Bristolian wit in this show include pompous authority, cultural elitism, organised religion, dis-organised religion, corporatism, CCTV surveillance, lost childhood innocence and militarism.

The most spectacular and one of the most amusing canvasses on show develops one of Banksy’s most famous images, the “Laugh now but one day we’ll be in charge” placard monkey is extrapolated to a scene from the House of Commons where the primates really have taken over, only to slip into the stereotypical boorish, baying, sniggering, posturing behaviour of MPs familiar from TV news shots of PM’s questions. This epic painting provides sumptuous amusement to the viewer prepared to linger over the detail.

Laugh Now We Are In Charge; Howaboutno

detail; Nolionsinengland

Banksy usually pokes fun at authority so it is amusing to see the ultimate authority, a grey-rinsed, pinafored mother carefully arranging the face bandana of the punk quaffed anarchist in “Don’t Forget Your Scarf”. “Couldn’t possibly have you going on the riot looking like you don’t know how to dress yourself darling” she seems to say.

Don’t Forget Your Scarf Dear; Nolionsinengland

Banksy’s main picture room contains a studio mock-up which is absolutely fascinating, though impossible to spend more than a few minutes in front of with the pressure of the crowds. Small working sketches pinned to walls hint at the evolution of Banksy’s masterpieces as well as perhaps either a large number of ideas which got ditched at the concept stage or may indeed be seen on a street somewhere sometime in the future [during the drafting of this, one of the sketches which provoked that thought HAS been turned into a street piece]. An arsenal of used Banksy tag stencils of various sizes hang ready to go, which is ironic as Banksy hasn’t tagged his street pieces for a long time, certainly not in this era when the majority of his street work is legal.

photo: Howaboutno

Not everything in this second Banksy room is easy to comprehend. A central feature consists of a heavily graffiti’d wall lain on the floor with cleaning tools lying around, the end of the wall that has been subject to buffing has warped into some kind of Alice in Wonderland meets Einstein mesh surface. This probably requires some thinking but on the basis that Banksy’s concepts never requires deep thought, well, frankly we moved on but did notice a small scale prototype of the wall lying around on the floor of the studio mock-up.

photo: ArtOfTheState

Other favourites include the Britannia who has replaced the trident symbolising the nautical supremacy through which the Empire was won with a CCTV through which she now maintains her law and order, Simon Cowell inserted into a Degas “strictly come ballet dancing at The Opera, Rue Petelier” ballet scene and the iconic photograph of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, father of many major feats of civil engineering which still form part of the railway infrastructure today, collaged with a sign giving directions to “buses on rail replacement service”.

Buses On Rail Replacement; photo: Nolionsinengland

Some of the gags are funny but only in a fairly weak way, the “Loft conversion coming soon” links modern property developers to the colonial fighters winning the West 225 years ago but the visual pun is too remote from modern-day dream-home sellers to be really funny. Perhaps this image defines a dilemma for Banksy, we generally enjoy a directness and simplicity in the humour and while the joke here is that the American Frontier War led has centuries later to US loft conversion and thus gentrification, it isn’t sufficiently obvious – if Banksy doesn’t serve up simplicity and laughs then he has failed.

Coming Soon, Loft Conversion; Howaboutno

Seeing the animatronics show reproduced here smooths over a niggle that such a radically different departure was unveiled in NY and had hitherto been un-seen in the UK. The hot dogs jokes work because we know Banksy is making fun of things that aren't good for you but which Americans consume in large quantities and they look like willies and behave like pet gerbils. The adult CCTV tending its three fledglings looks like an eagle-eyed mother protectively watching over her brood thanks to the clever simulation of the swivelling motions of a CCTV scanning for potential wrong doing or suspicious people with less than 10 quid haircuts, at the same time Banksy is revisiting his concerns over the proliferation of CCTVs in our society so putting them in cages suggests protection and an official breeding program.

CCTV fledglings; Nolionsinengland

The most refreshing and enjoyable feature of the show are the Banksy booby trap devices scattered around the rest of the permanent displays outside the three Banksy rooms. Sewn quietly into various display cases of geological wonders, porcelain dolls and what the show guide describes as “boring old plates” are Banksy’s inserted subversions. Among examples of what look like West Country vicar’s wife’s tea sets there is one of those nauseatingly twee Sunday supplement cutsey kitten plates.

Photo:Howaboutno

Other inappropriate insertions include a gas mask wearing ballerina among porcelain figurines and a bong pipe with grass debris amongst white china decorated in a classical Greek style. A stuffed rat clasping a with backpack paint brush furtively addresses an intricately patterned silk but doesn’t actually mark it, there are limits to the license granted for actually defacing the original exhibits. This piece is an extension of the legendary pranks on the Natural History museum and British museum where he secreted fully labelled spoof works into the displays without the staffs’ knowledge. Elsewhere in the Bristol Museum if you look carefully you can find the “Peckham trolley” hunter on stone.

Fight The Ban; Nolionsinengland

This treasure hunt cleverly walks a line between obvious and the obscure, teasing us with the uncertainty over whether items may be “real or Banksy”. One new acquisition to the natural history section mocks a label on a glass surface which highlights some fossil evidence of dinosaur skin (frankly, not that surprising) with a label over another section of pebbly looking stones identifying dinosaur sick. Or is it new? Graffoto could not reach a consensus.

Photo: Nolionsinengland

The duality of being a museum AND an art gallery allows Banksy, attributed as “Local Artist”, to hang a scattering of canvasses among the paintings permanently displayed to generations of Bristolian children and pensioners in the building. The Banksy’s are modified oil paintings which construct their gag by taking scuzzy aspects of contemporary urban society and throwing them into incongruous relief against a painting of the rustic tranquillity of a bygone era. Such pieces work in isolation, making a point or creating a gag within themselves and no need to look further but others react with or to their surroundings, looking incongruous, cheeky, and just plain wrong. Mastery of placement of street art is a Banksy hallmark and in the gallery setting he maintains a relish for allowing his jokes to bounce off the surrounding artifacts. “How Do You Like Your Eggs” hits twin targets in giving a burkha-shrouded cook a saucy western lingerie apron and it also mimics the somewhat stilted gestures of the adjacent grandiose portraits.

How Do You Like You Eggs; Nolionsinengland

“Dogging”, originally shown in the LA Barely Legal show, features a straw-hatted shepherd accompanied by his beagle on the bank of a stream whilst on the opposite bank in an aging Ford Escort a pair of white buttocks does the business between a pair of plump thighs ending in ankles on the dashboard. It is so 20th century urban Britain that we must all get the joke.

Dogging, Local Artist; Howaboutno

Favourite for many among the Banksy modified oil paintings hidden in the posh part of the museum is Agency Workers in which a peasant labouring in the field of Jean-Francois Millet’s The Gleaners has left the plane of the picture and takes a relaxed looking cigarette break. At the same time, Banksy likens the minimum wage worker to gleaners scavenging the last available sustenance from the leavings of civilisation but simultaneously capturing serene pleasure in a secret skive off work.

Agency Workers (Gleaners), Local Artist; Howaboutno

With a lot of Banksy’s art it is easy to scratch the surface to reveal a political theme underneath, albeit usually quite weak. Perhaps the most political piece is the Guantanamo prisoner-of-war/detainee/criminal (delete according to which legislature you are in) using a Bristol Boxkite plane which has been in the permanent exhibition for decades to make a Colditz style escape. Any protest against un-just detention without legal representation and denial of prisoner's legal rights is too deeply submerged under the visual joke to really make a political point. But then again, its great to see what Banksy does with the incumbent Musseum paraphenalia. The Battered Buddha which really worked very well as a spray painted image at the Cans Festival re-appears as a bland milky white statue with almost indiscernible colouring to represent bruising and blood. At the time of Cans Festival in 2008, the assault by Chinese security forces on Buddhist monks at Lhasa was comparatively recent and everyone was aware of it, now the plight of the monks has slipped off the agenda so this piece is sort of left in limbo, it’s a new work with little context but it references a retrospective piece which was intensely current at the time piece.

Guantanamo Boxkite; Shellshock

Organised religion shouldn’t be immune from teasing though even Banksy seems to pull his punches in the sketch “Prophet Muhammad Reclining Nude”, the joke of course is Muhammad posing for a painting and in the nude at that, whereas under Islamic tradition it is basically prohibited to create an image of the prophet, so of course Banksy doesn’t since there would be too much irony that Banksy whose sacred image is almost as jealousy protected should breach a prophet’s “no image” rights.

The show has had several additions since the opening including a tear streaked Ronald McDonald reflecting on a soul-less existence and nutrition-lite food optimised for minimum cost and maximum addiction, a bottle of hooch by his side, dangling his legs over a high ledge over the outside main door whilst the queuing masses not directly in the splat zone silently will him to fall off.

Jump Ronald; photo: Howaboutno

Perhaps the keynote of Banksy’s oeuvre this time out is nostalgia, a chance to re-visit some of the gags that have delighted us in the past, a chance to share in the knowing taunts against Establishment, though the tone is more sniggering tease rather than tormenting. The show re-affirms his status as the country’s favourite mischief maker, ironic as there is nothing illegal as such about this outing. His place in the heart is akin to the naughty boy who endears himself to all, a West Country Dennis The Menace or some latterday Robin Hood. This show further binds his work into our hearts even though there is a discomforting suspicion that we the common herd are the target of much of his wit. Gotta be able to laugh at ourselves, like.

We don't learn anything new about Banksy, his image remains as jealously guarded as any religious prophet and to the extent that he was a mystery he remains a mystery despite the work-in-progress scrapings in the studio mock-up. The show is an immensely enjoyable experience, the work remains immediately accessible, it’s a feast from Britain’s foremost popular artist and he certainly isn’t losing his popular touch.

I’d like to share the blame for writing this with HowAboutNo and Bravo99 whose company, comments and observation shaped the views here. Many words have been spewed on the subject of this show by critics and jobbing tourism feature writers, rightly too given the scale of the attraction and the continuous crowd it has drawn, Graffoto comes late to the fray but so what, you get it here from a perspective of genuine enthusiasm for the graff and street art scene and no taint of vested interest.

A side effect of this show is that pictures from the show have flooded the internet which has had to be expanded to cope. Among the better sets Graffoto recommends (and reminding you the shellshock/Graffoto guide can be found here)

Art Of The State

Howaboutno

Nolionsinengland

shellshock

Eddiedangerous

Petro

2009-08-08T00:54:00.010+01:00

24-26 July 2009
The Rag Factory
London

Graffiti writers have been appearing in galleries for 25 years, though in the context of the hot ticket that was street art moving into galleries to prostitute itself as Urban Art, proper graffiti writers have trailed behind in the gutter. A welcome trend surfacing in chisel fringed, skinny-jeans wearing Shoreditch is the profusion of shows from real graffiti writers (however - see footnote), Vibes, Insa, and Panik being a few mentioned here recently, not to forget Andy Seize.

Petro show

Petro is a writer whose recent graffiti productions in the wild (well, HOFs perhaps) have a very distinctive style, strongly characterised by diagonal themes and lots of arrows.

Petro, EOS - Bristol

Petro was one of the first un-invited writers to piece over a launch piece from Cans II.

Petro is old skool and thanks to Skire for this pic of a piece from 1994 which indicates a wilder scratchier and harder to read style

photo: Skire

Petro has seized the initiative by hosting his own brief show in The Rag Factory, a corridor like space set back from a side street off Brick Lane. Pop up gallery would be less accurate than “out of sight, hidden, knock on the door, speak through the slot and give the password” off-piste space. The show is housed in a couple of long out-houses which surfaces the hidden, reminding me of well light cowsheds. The distribution of work in the main show room falls into four distinct groupings.

The key phase which is characteristic Petro, the trademark outdoor lettering delivered within, consists of some 30 or so varied landscape PETRO words on plywood and natural coloured canvas. The word Petro is explored in a variety of letterforms and a profusion of squirming arrows which almost stretch the letters like a medieval torturer’s rack.

The outlines explore a range of styles with clouds, crimped bubbles and 3D geometries.

Fills range from random bubbles to non-existent negative space forms

Petro negative space

While the majority of the PETRO words are comparatively easy to read, several pieces are based around geometric patterns confound your senses, challenging your belief that the word PETRO probably can be made out in the spaces, lines, divisions and links.

Petro’s colour selection suggests an inclination towards drama, in a good way, the pink and black Galactic Scaffold can be forgiven its name for its stunning lurid colour and pattern.

Galactic Scaffold

Leaning more towards conceptual art is the “Life of a Pencil” installation, a table with a pair of yellow pencils embossed with the title of the show, another pair of pencils shaved down to the rubber stub and a jar holding the entire body of pencil sharpening. Coupled with this piece are two sheets dense with furious free-hand horizontal pencil lines which look like the artist has eked out a pencil’s entire lifetime ability to draw lines and then discovered he got 2.316miles out of it. Contemplating the miles per pencil and carbon expenditure correlation starts to make your head hurt.

The Life of a Pencil/2.316 miles

Other Petro creations include some Petro wallpaper with dirty black Petro characters complete with fat oily drips, a collection of dinosaur monsters roaming the eaves of the gallery, one of which in a moment surreal intervention chose it’s moment to drop onto Pure Evil’s head.

A less satisfactory element of the show is a collection of rough paper jottings, black book records and naive felt tip illustrations. The black book extracts have evidently been passed around peers, friends and critics for annotation (“when are ya gonna grow up you imbecile?”) and so have the usual curiosity value.

black book pages

Overlord

Four years ago the explosion of street art into the yuppie walls of middle ranking financial services employees (raises hand, guilty) allowed people to buy credibility through the perceived links to illegal, albeit safe and sanitised, street art and poseur-ish anti-establishment sentiment. Next stop may be putting “real” graffiti art on your walls and based on his work in this show Petro would be as good a starting point as any.

More pictures from the show here

Rarekind Gallery: New favourite gallery Rarekind which relocated this year from Brighton to London will sadly be closing its doors after the London Handstyles show in a couple of weeks. Rarekind has been a breath of fresh air through the London graff art scene and, in conjunction with the opening of Chrome and Black paint shop on the same site, has been hugely influential in giving the Shoreditch graff scene a kick up the arse this year. To sugar the pill, the owners told us that Rarekind will continue to stage graff art show using pop up spaces, we look forward to a forthcoming show on 3 decades of London graffiti.

K-Guy Framed!

2009-07-25T18:32:00.004+01:00

We generally know what to expect wandering Shoreditch, the epicentre of London’s street art scene so more than a little curiosity was provoked by the oddity of a picture frame stuck to a garage door known in the past as a street art magnet but more recently just splattered with gig flyers. The latter phenomenon is a product of the zero tolerance buff on street art but that’s a debate for another time.

Cursory inspection determines that the frame comes from Ikea, it’s a totally standard package even down to the standard IKEA backing sheet inside the frame and the impenetrable and unlikely scandi product name visible. So we thought.

ITIFFARG

It is immediately obvious that this is conceptual art on the street and the concept is thankfully not obscure. Actually, there are several concepts, the anomalous mass produced frames is referencing the commoditisation of art, decrying the exploitation of the street art phenomenon as a shameless marketing tool and then there’s the dig at people who are happy to buy their art pre-packaged from any soul-less furniture emporium, shrink-wrapped and anodyne, bland and innocuous and brimful with the deception of a designer lifestyle on a mass production budget.

YUGK

The current state of street art is pretty damn poor, anything aspiring to imagery more complex than photoshopped cartoon characters or production values beyond inkjet printouts put up with flour and water or poorly cut single layer stencils is going to stand out. This particular example shines because it takes the simplest art necessity and by putting it in the street context raises so many interesting thoughts and questions.

Tranabru

Close inspection reveals that what looks like standard IKEA packaging is in fact clever re-modelled work from the artist. Firstly those Scandinavian product names, turns out they are just street art descriptors spelt backwards, add a couple of dots over the odd vowel and Bobs your uncle, you have a whole new Ikea product range.

The street art references continue in the small product icon in the middle of the sheet, you know, the one inside the picture frame to remind you that you are looking at a picture frame, the artist had installed a couple of spray cans.

The identity of the creator is revealed down among the patent labels and hazardous picture frame warnings were you will spot the tag of the artist, none other than K-Guy! This isn’t meant to be smart-arsed or deliberately smug writing, initially I thought they were completely un-modified frames and missed the detail that K-Guy had introduced his own Ikea product sheet into the frame. Too be honest all the concepts had been realised just by positioning picture frames in these street art halls of fame, the rest is vanity! (same can be said of any artist siggy).

It’s Sheep We’re Up Against

Frankly, it should have been easy to spot the hand of K-Guy much earlier because if there is one person who has consistently gone for a clever and more ironic level of street art installation it’s our political and social satirist K-Guy. This blog is beginning to look like K-Guy’s PR bitch but in terms of actual art on the street there’s not much else hitting his quality on the streets these days.

ITIFFARG

We found three IKEA frames today, there is apparently a fourth and K-Guy got his collar felt by the fuzz when installing the fifth, losing his ladder and drill into the bargain and in the process suffering the scorn and derision of some tag fag who was amused at the sight of an artfag getting arrested. Kept it real bruv!

Tranabru

INSA – “Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places”

2009-07-18T12:28:00.006+01:00

Bateman Row Arches, London
17 – 29 July 2009

all photos: NoLionsInEngland

I’m a sucker for Illusion rooms. From Cept’s mindblowing 3 week individual labour of love in Dalston last year to D*Face’s memorable Haring inspired room at his Apopalypse show, any time an artist gets to indulge themselves in something which is more experience than product, I raise a glass and a cheer.

Entering Insa’s show to find a large part of the space given over to a dis-orientating ultra-perspective black and white illusion room with a pair of chrome buttocks at its’ focal point presses all the right buttons.

Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places

The words Insa and fetish often appear in the same sentence. If you ever come across a website which has sidebar links such as Legs, stockings, heels, booty, candy pink, ankles and stilettos, chances are that INSA has started a porn site based on various favoured fetishes.

But before getting to that, it’s worth reminding ourselves that Insa has awesome skills with a spraycan. At the 2009 London Meeting Of Styles INSA got his name up with nice fades, sharp lines and a perfect facsimile of what since has been found to be the signature tune logo of 80s sitcom Cheers.

Insa 2009

INSA’s warped stilettos have popped up on shutters, walls and boarded up shopfronts in colour (pink) and black and white across Shoreditch.

Insa - 2009

This Escheresque repeated image mural in a suitably sleezly Shoreditch location has been done more than once by INSA. Some people believe the sculpted piece is a heart, they could be right, even the PR company sits on the fence in its printed puffery, describing them as his trademark hearts/asses (which I thought was an animal Jesus rode in the bible. I always have seen these as a pair of buttocks and stocking topped thighs, perhaps I am tuned to the man’s wavelength.

Shoreditch Relief

Evidence of Insa’s presence on the street has even extended to reaches inside windows in derelict slum properties and stiletto paste-ups. Check out Insa’s pieces and production pages on his website (link at the bottom)

Back to the central feature. What is the point of Insa’s exercise? What is the......bottom line? Well, Insa must be aware that the shortest distance between two points on a 3 dimensionally curved surface is a curve. In Insa-world this translates into the shortest between any two points on a lady’s leg definitely being a curve, no matter how straight the seams on her stockings or the bands on the stripey tights may be. No curve shall go un-touched. The point of this work is not the huge display of perspective lines guiding into the chrome buttocks, or the two tone patterns on walls ceiling and floor, it’s about how the chrome buttocks turns those straight lines into curves, how the reflected lines caress the curve of the buttocks and generally about drawing attention to a bit of bootilicious magic, follow the landing lines, hurtle down those tracks and let your fingers trace those curves baby.

Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places (Caution: Objects May Appear Larger Than They Really Are)

The show title “Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places” is not immediately resolved by the work on display except possibly to the extent that the dominant piece of the room shares its’ title with the show. It is left to you to decide why the chrome arse piece should be graced with this moniker.

Of the more conventional framed art on the wall, most interesting is this twist on graffiti culture, where the lines of his repeated booty motif are overlapped to suggest a chain link fence and inside a “break in case of emergency” style box are a pair of wire-cutters, the train yard graffer’s best friend for effective access to secure train lay-ups.

Sunny Sky Over My Favourite Park In South London [blah blah] With Some Expensive Bolt Cutters

The subtle but most extraordinary eroticism of the curves in the repeating motif is most evident in the pink print version, the essential femine curves are distilled down to a simple pop art abstract style.

Empty Aspirations print

Three monochrome mirrored screen prints continue the core themes of the stiletto, the “In All The Wrong Places” arse and the repeating arse, the challenge with each of these was distinguishing the reflection of the black and white illusion room from the print on the mirror itself, these mirrors probably will create a stunning effect in a different coloured room. Say pink for example.

Looking For Love Mirror

The very large legs straddling the opening to the art room (there is an adjacent trainer salesroom or something) make an impression which leaves you in no doubt of two things, firstly Insa’s subject matter and secondly, the corporate logo providing the sponsorship. The humour in entering between the legs is not going to be lost on many and you need to sit outside the show looking in to appreciate how INSA has screwed around scale at the entrance in a “through the looking glass” manner.

Enter between the legs

It is of course easy to get prissy about the supping with the devil corporate connection with some of the work in the show but whatever it takes to give the funding and time to create this temple to the female curve is forgivable.

You might forgive the corporate logo integrated into one of the black and white prints too but I bet you wouldn’t put it on your wall. So, instead of that print, lets end contemplating how Insa manages to take that most effeminate of colours, pink and by combining it with black and white creates the effect of intense masculine fetishism and, here a little fun for the kids, scroll your screen up and down see how the surroundings around the arse throb. It’s what this work is all about.

Looking For Love print

These and a few other pictures from the show here

Insa’s pieces, productions and other shizz here

Dead, Abandoned and Pieced

2009-07-16T13:09:00.017+01:00

The Trans Pennine Nomads (TPN) could rightly be considered to be the best writers crew in England, and a lot of their pieces co-exist with the rubble of the old Huncoat Power Station in Lancashire. Join me for a visual ride into them thar hills….

All photos by shellshock

The disused power station at Huncoat (between Accrington and Burnley) is easily the best hidden graff den I’ve ever been to. Rubble and shit are everywhere, right next to stunning pieces from the TPN crew (and a few others). A visual overload, you don’t know where to look (actually I do know where to look….. look up for graffiti… and look down for that pit full of glass and old shoes that you are about to fall in….). Local taggers, toys and throwuppers also use the place, and being quiet and off the beaten track it’s a great place to practise and perfect. Take your time, have a can, and use your cans……

It’s not as difficult to find as you might think, and there is even an old sign to welcome you :-)

Crie and Pryme (local lad and founder of the TPN) are my two fave writers and as you duck down into the building one of their (relatively rough) joint pieces greets you. But there is far far more than that to come….

Despite all the advantages of being next to a colliery and railway line, the power station actually had a fairly short life, only working from 1956 to 1984. Most of it was demolished by 1990, apart from this one building. At some point it is due to be turned into a waste treatment plant.

The end wall of the central area is obviously an attention grabber, including for photography angles, as the suited characters hold the pieces out as canvases.

Small rooms abound everywhere, all with rubble and paint. It’s so peaceful, yet so loud, as glass crunches under your unsteady feet. Photography angles are everywhere, and old bits of the power station workings still live on (plus the toilets - I had a waz there rather than onto the rubble - it just felt right…)

A whitewashed separate room actually has the top pieces though. A Crie & Pryme collab on one wall, and Pryme’s collab with Riot 68 on the other. These are skills you don’t learn overnight; many of the best writers are approaching middle age now, and / or have come back into the game after time away in the 90’s.

There are also bits upstairs, and great views out over the Lancashire hills. It’s a bit weird actually, being in this bombed out wreck, yet such natural beauty being what seems like only an arms length away.

This Pryme (left) and Crie (right) collab is the main piece upstairs. [I’m sure you can easily now recognise who does which bit! They are so different yet it works together…]

But remember.....shuuuush... Don’t tell the toyz where the best spots are :-)

More photos on flickr

The Short Guide to 'Banksy vs Bristol Museum'

2009-07-14T19:22:00.015+01:00

By less than popular demand, shell shock (a train spotter and admin monkey at the Banksy group on flickr, and author of ’Banksy Location & Tours’) trawled 2,000+ photos, poured over a hotch potch of info, asked people stupid questions, and drove many miles to the Museum, just to bring you this short guide to the greatest exhibition of all time (well, maybe....the art jury is drunk and is utterly incapable of anything, including a verdict)

What is in the Exhibition?

The exhibition is officially ginormous. Easily Banksy’s biggest exhibition ever.

Apparently it contains 100 artefacts, of which 78 of them are new.

Although there are several whole rooms dedicated just to Banksy‘s work, there are also bits of his work dotted all around the various rooms of the Museum / Gallery. The guide below tries to round them all up.

People have already noticed that some exhibits seem to have moved over time (or possibly even turned up late for the bash...?), so please don't think we are totally mad if something isn't there, has moved, is wrong, makes you looks stupid, causes an argument with your partner, etc

NOTE - the names I've given them aren't necessarily 'official', correct or sensible. Some may be funny, but it can't be guaranteed. I’m not paid [in peanuts] to make you laugh you know......

There is a free small flyer/guide to exhibition available at the venue (see below). For ease of wandering, this guide references some of the (usually unofficial) room names given on there.

Many thanks to unusualimage for scanning this in (click to enlarge)

GROUND FLOOR

Entrance

Part of the ‘Boghenge‘ installation that was done at The Glastonbury Festival in 2007 (note entrance sign, and the gross Crow with Tampon on top of the portaloos!)

Reception Area (Labelled ‘Information’ on the flyer for the show)

• Ice Cream Van
• ‘Metropolitan Peace’ Riot Copper on a children’s ride
• 7 statues (clockwise from front left side)

- David as Suicide Bomber
- Angel of the North
- Angel with Paint Pot on Head
- Lion Tamer (eaten)
- Bashed Up Buddha
- Homeless Venus de Milo (& melted bicycle)
- Renaissance Paris Hilton goes Shopping

British & South West Wildlife Room

• Riverbank Ratty (with spray can) - In the 'River Bank' cabinet - This looks the same as the ‘Banksus Militus Vandalus’ rat sneaked into the Natural History Museum in 2004.

Assyrian Reliefs Room

Carved model of Jerusalem (by Tawfiq Salsaa) - with 284 toy soldiers and 1 terrorist added by Banksy

Egypt Room

‘Reduced’ Terracotta style Soldier

Left hand Passage between Reception and Unnatural History - by the Ladies toilets

Michael Jackson modified oil, and shrine (This was added after Jacko's death - On 6th July the Bristol Evening Post reported that another Banksy painting was being added to the exhibition - ".....placed above a black shelf on which stand several lit candles.")

Animatronics Room (Labelled ‘Unnatural History’ on the flyer)

(clockwise from front left side)

• Food Store (Sausages)
• Swimming Fish Finger(s) [originally there were 2 fishes, but they broke down and were later replaced by one larger one]
• Chicken Nuggets
• Stone Slab (“The Bad Artists Imitate, The Great Artists Steal”)
• CCTV Mothers and Babies
• Leopard Skin Coat
• Tweety Pie
• The Monkey as an Artist
• Vanity Rabbit

Costume Jewellery Area

Suitcase of Cash (Di-faced Tenners)

Café (Labelled ‘Another Cafe’ on the flyer)

Wooden Crate with Balloons

The Art of Banksy Room

(Clockwise from Entrance - approx)

Rodeo Girl on Spraycan
You have got to be Kidding me (a.k.a. £10,000)
The Artists Studio (including a paint splodged fire extinguisher shown on the exhibition leaflet)

Collection of Seven Images & Sketches (clockwise from top left)
- Degas X Factor
- Guns Magazine
- Isambard Kingdom Brunel (Rail Replacement)
- Portrait of the Prophet Muhammad
- Rhino Hunters
-’The Exact Same Bowls’
- Bomb Disposal Unit
Who Are All These People?

This Is Not A Photo Opportunity
The Key to Making Great Art is all in the Compositio
Go Flock Yourself

Dorothy - Not on Canvas Anymore
Hardhat Tortoise

The Lone Roller
‘Banksy’ tag in Cage
Heavy Weaponry

CCTV Britannia & Union Flag
Old St Cherub
Workers of the World Unite!
Punk with Mum
Luxury Loft Complex
Nob Artiste
Thomas the Tag Engine
Masked Writer / Bandit (& Step Ladder)
* Subject to Availability for a Limited Period Only
Rembrandt with Wobbly Eyes
Toff with Toy Arrow on Head
Idyllic Klan Hanging
Monkey Parliament
Flies on Still Life
Panda Trophy Head
Woman with Groucho Marx additions
Exit Through Gift Shop
The Power of a Big Gold Frame

Renaissance Couple (Seaside Style)
Riot Police Meadow
Plant Holder with Head

Donut Cavalcade
Fat Tourist Rickshaw
I Hate Mondays

Graffiti Related Activity Recorded by the Police
No Ball Games
This Is Where I Draw the Line (in dustbin)
Warped Wall

FIRST FLOOR

Landing (Labelled ‘Maps’ on the flyer)

• 'Escape from Guantanamo’ - A Guantanamo prisoner in the Bristol Boxkite
• Leathered Priest (statue)

Geology / Minerals Section

• Dildo in the Stalagmites and Stalactites area
• Shopping Trolley Hunter on Rock

Wildlife in Glass Boxes Section

• Lamb with Muzzle

Gypsy Caravan

• Eviction Notice and Wheel Clamp on the Caravan

British Wildlife Section

• Fox and Countryside Alliance Fox Hunting Placard

TOP FLOOR

All modified oils, except those marked #

Most of the modified oils have a small label next to them, saying ‘Local Artist’, and giving a name and date for the painting.

On the Stairs

• UFO Invasion - 2006

French Art Gallery

• Agency Job (Gleaners) - 2009
• Girl At The Windows - 2006
• Water Spillage (No label on this one)

European Art Gallery

• Silent Night - 2005
• Venus (After Surgery) - 2006
• Landscape Near Hartcliffe - 2005

British Art Gallery

• Flight To Egypt (Budget Version) - 2009
• How Do You Like Your Eggs? - 2009
• Dogging - 2006

Modern British Art Gallery

• Improved Spot Painting - 2009 (Banksy, over a Damien Hirst painting)

Victorian Art Gallery

• Home On The Hill - 2006

Glass Cabinet on the staircase between the Victorian Art Gallery & the Artists from Bristol Gallery

Ice Cream Turd (this was originally on a plinth in the 'Art Of Banksy' room, but was moved at the start of the exhibition - I imagine it was considered a hinderance to the large crowds!)

Artists from Bristol Gallery

• Home Sweet Home (No label on this one)

Boring Old Plates

• Hash Pipe #
• Ballet Girl (with Gasmask) #

All the boring (I'm a practical man...) bits.....

Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery
Queen's Road
Bristol
BS8 1RL

13 June - 31 August

FREE EXHIBITION
Open Daily 10am- 5pm
Tel: 0117 922 3571

“Situated in between the very tall H H Wills memorial building (University of Bristol) and Browns restaurant, at the top of Park Street.

By Bus: Numbers 1, 8, 8a, 9, 40, 40a, 41, 54”

Website - http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ccm/navigation/leisure-and-culture/museums-and-galleries

How Do I Get There?

From Bristol Temple Meads Train Station (BS1 6QF)

Bus - The numbers 8, 8A and 9 all leave from just outside the main station entrance and stop opposite the museum. Follow the link below for an online timetable (this one is for Monday to Friday but there are links on that page for weekend tables):

http://www.firstgroup.com/ukbus/southwest/bristol/timetables/timetable.php?day=1&source_id=2&service=8/8A/9/9A&routeid=593741&operator=3&source=sp

Or you can get a number 54 or a number 1 (both heading for ‘Cribbs Causeway’) from the main road (A4) that runs past the entrance road to the station. Just walk down the incline from the station, and cross over the road, and you’ll see the bus stop outside the Reckless Engineer pub.

If you can’t spot where the museum is, ask someone. It should be pretty easy to spot though. It’s on the right hand side, at the top of the steep ‘Park St’, next to the very tall Wills Building (it looks like a Cathedral, but it isn’t…that will teach you to nudge your friend, pretending to be clever, saying "That's the Cathedral..." )

Walk - It’s about a 30 minute walk from the train station, and once you get off the busy roads by the station it is a pleasant walk. Past St Mary Redcliffe (famous Church with enormous spire). Over the floating harbour, through Queens Square (which is pedestrianised to a degree), or a detour to see Bansky’s boating reaper on the side of the Thekla (floating club). Then up Park St (past the Bristol Cathedral if you want, especially convenient if you’ve come through the harbour area) and have a photo op at Banksy’s Window Lovers (bottom of Park St - opposite the end of the crescent shaped Council building). Continue up Park St and you can hardly miss the Museum at the top of the street, on your right. If you are around late enough, or on a Sunday, the shutter at the Rollermania shop (62 Park Row, BS1 5LE) is usually down in the evenings and on Sunday. It’s a very early Banksy and Kato freehand collaboration, although it’s nothing like what you’d now expect from Banksy!

Ferry Boat (we kid you not….) - If you want a slightly different experience, you can also get the Ferry from Temple Meads. The landing stage is a 3 minute walk from the railway station's main foyer (follow the white 'ferry' signs). This is West Country so bring yer own life jackets :-)

Take the ferry to the landing stage by The SS Great Britain. Then walk through the Harbourside Village towards the new City of Bristol College, over Deanery Road, up York Place onto Brandon Hill. Then past Cabot Tower on your left and into Berkeley Square right opposite the museum.

If you prefer to use other landing stages, there are others that might be of use (e.g. ‘Prince St‘, ‘Millennium Square‘, and ‘City Centre’).

For full information, use their website - www.bristolferry.com

From Bristol Coach / Bus Station (Marlborough Street, BS1 3NU)

The coach / bus station is easier to walk from than the train station, and is no longer the skanky tramp hangout that it used to be :-) It’s also close to the main shopping area so if your other half / friends need retail therapy, they can do that whilst you look at Banksy’s anti-consumerist messages...

From the front of the coach station you just walk up and up the main road basically, bearing right when needed (Marlborough St / Upper Maudlin St etc - the road changes name 4 times before you get to the museum!). Around the half way mark you also come across Banksy’s sniper (look backwards down the hill to see it - it‘s just after the hospital, on the side wall of the office for the ‘Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Appeal’)

It’s hardly worth taking a bus, unless you really want to, but several will go up that way I imagine. Frankly I got bored of writing this guide at this point.....

If you have time, it’s a 15 minute round detour from the coach station to see Banksy’s ‘Mild Mild West’ mural (walk along Jamaica St, and it’s at the junction with the main rd - Stokes Croft).

By Car

Central Bristol is relatively easy to get from any direction. Many people use the M32 route. You can keep to the signposted main roads, or if you feel brave enough to navigate the smaller streets, you can come off at J3 of the M32 and go up through St Pauls or Cotham / Kingsdown.

There are plenty of car parks (e.g. NCP car parks at West End and Trenchard Street) and on-street parking in the area. If money is tight there's some free on street parking you can fight over, about a 5/10 minute walk away. It’s around the back of the main roads, near the various University and hospital buildings in the area (e.g. Tyndall’s Park Rd, Belgrave Rd, and part of Elmdale Rd)

A big thank you to the Banksy group members on flickr whose information helped this guide

Bill London: They Seek Him Here

2009-07-11T17:52:00.006+01:00

Rarekind Gallery
London
Jul 10 – Aug 1 2009

all photos: NoLionsInEngland

After a fallow period buried beneath the post Banksy tidal sludge of pasted lazer jet print-outs, real painted graffiti has been showing signs of a pulse the last four months or so in Shoreditch. Some spark has triggered an avalanche of graffiti in all its' full glorious letterform manifestations from pissed up tags to Olympic standard wild-style burners. Many sperm have nibbled at the egg to create this fertile explosion of life, one of the most potent seemingly being the arrival of Chrome and Black in the area, the other obviously being the Meeting of Styles event.

Among the various species making up the spectrum of graffiti life, at the top of the food-chain are master writers from RT crew such as Vibes.

Vibes RT

Of course, there is no link between the artist Bill London whose show opened in the Rarekind Gallery beneath Chrome and Black and anyone who would write VIBES RT on walls around London, at least there isn’t in the show flyer, and no one met at the show preview went by the name VIBES (actually, no one I met went by the name Bill London either but there ya go, just one of those evenings where people weren’t wearing lapel badges).

Vibes RT, Parklifers, DasR

First impression of the show was a refreshing sense of restraint, this wasn’t a pile ‘em high sell em cheap “here’s everfink from my black book ‘n stuff the gallerist had out the back” exercise. The gallery walls have been given an illusionist relief jigsaw treatment, providing a background matrix to small number of canvasses spanning themes from urban realism to oriental fantasy landscape.

They Seek Him Here

With the range of styles in the show, Bill London transcends the limited graffiti form. The show can be divided into canvasses with letter forms for folk who like graff content in their wall decoration and art with no particular links to graff. The work ranges from almost realism to abstract and from austere urban to the almost pastoral.

Rising Down

Using classic fades combined with splatters, the charmingly named Chlamydia forms a wild calligraphic exercise in writing letters, in a form recognisable instantly as VIBES, compare with the street pieces photographed above. I’m told that the colouring in the picture is similar to the colour of a pair of skimpies tossed on the bedroom floor in a public information film here in the UK, maybe I just haven’t found the right channel.

Chlamydia

One common and somewhat baffling gallery show feature is the part-wall-part-canvas mural, it always seems weird to contemplate taking away a small piece of what is a larger single artwork, They Seek Him Here offers some kind of way round this defect by throwing in a photograph of the complete piece separately with each of the ten canvasses in the mural.

VIBES

The individual canvasses from this wall piece are going to look fairly abstract, in the example below there is a horrible Andrew McAttee type thing going on (horrible if that’s your reaction to McAttee’s squeaky clean bubbles)

They Seek Him Here (1 of 10 unique canvasses)

Signs of Life takes a macabre eco-doom stance and combines it with a futurist urban landscape, where close scrutiny reveals all is not as it seems. Buildings made of ghetto blasters, grenades and hand signs crowned by a winged spraycan deity form a backdrop to yoots lobbing molotovs across an arena of dead bodies, syringes and pipes like fat doobies leaking toxic waste.

Signs Of Life

If graffiti is art lying in the gutter then Broken Window Theory is a trompe l’oeil looking up at kind of tenement whose rough inner-city appearance condemns the place to become a self fulfilling kind of housing project hatchery breeding crime and attracting crime. Sufficiently flat and cartoonish to avoid looking like an attempt at photorealism (thank god), details like the clothes line emphasize the residential and community use of the building, perhaps appearances can be deceptive.

Broken Window Theory

At the other end of the spectrum from the gritty urban feel of the last two pieces Bill London tends towards a eastern natural minimilism in the trio of tryptichs Bamboo which owe no debt to the alphabet at all.

Bamboo

The rustic theme is maintained in the rural pond scene “Untitled”. The dragonfly which may be about to become fodder for the fish is a motif element which repeats in several places (and had me scanning though old photos of un-attributed graff as this dragon fly has been seen on walls recently if recollection serves).

Untitled

Take You There (below) follows the countryside theme of the two works above, though if you were to take a stab at where the scene might be, a molten sunrise over the Yangtse Gorge might be a reasonable guess. The cloudscape being scorched away by the rising sun has VIBES wild tag in the formations but the impact is almost subliminal, non-graff heads could be forgiven for not realising that there are any letters at all. So, good one for the parents and other-halves.

Take You There

The usual reaction within the graff community to writers putting work in galleries is to treat them as sell-outs and call them art-fags, Bill London exposes himself to this knuckle minded reaction but shows his work is varied enough and strong enough to make such sentiment pretty irrelevant (not to mention irrational). Curiously, whereas street artists prize an element of roughness, grime and runs in their work when they move indoors, as a writer Vibes seeks to display his incredible refined skills to produce a very clean image and highly proficient collection. Rarekind have done a great job of staging a very interesting show in their utilitarian white space.

Untitled

More pics from the show here

Subway Art 25th Anniversary Edition

2009-06-28T17:34:00.003+01:00

I thought that as a reference book and an X-ray shot into a counter culture that generally is inclined to shun publicity, Subway Art could not be bettered. Sitting with the 30cm x 43cm 25th anniversary addition on my knees (the book – not me) I conclude that as a photograph album this new edition just blows your socks off.

When I looked at the picture above I wondered if it was just the irregular lighting in my irregular kitchen that made the colour of the old book photos look a bit richer but a close comparison reveals the truth. At the larger scale the over-saturation of some of the colours is reduced and you can see more of the detail of the graff archaeology seeping through from the pieces underneath that have been gone over. Obviously, you can only really prove that with the Mk I eyeball, the pics you look at here have been distorted by being captured on the camera, buggered about with the flickr resolution compromises and then knackered by displaying on whatever device you use to read this. This picture is a detail of the L in a BLADE piece, old edition above, anniversary edition below.

The launch and signing graced by the presence of Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfont and Blade drew a legendary attendance of current graffiti writers and London Ol Skool (HAN – “Court and Social” page on this blog?).

Blade, Chalfont, Cooper. Sweet Toof canvas behind.

Interestingly, along with pages from the book being displayed on the wall, some huge canvasses painted by members of the Burning Candy crew provided their own stylistic and lyrical interpretation of a few of the historic and renowned images from Subway Art. Gorgeous stuff. And the Burning Candy guys had to queue like the rest to get their new books signed.

TEK 33 - Subway Fiction

Rowdy - "Train-surfing Mouse"

TEK 33 - Night Of The Denoms

K-Guy - Brown Stuff

2009-06-24T08:24:00.006+01:00

Street artists and biting political humourist K-Guy has passed verdict on UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s political career. A new installation in front of the Houses of Parliament shows Brown’s career going down the sewers.

Public anger at the sight of politicians with their snout in the tough doesn’t abate while Brown faces decimated popular support (though to be fair – we’d vote against all politicians if there was a suitable box on the ballot paper) and luke warm tolerance from a Cabinet that he appointed.

Stencil portraits passing down the toilet show Brown in a variety of tick-ridden and stressed out poses.

K-Guy’s edgy work has in the past included the spectacular Memorial to The Boom Economy at The Royal Exchange, London, the "cash under the matress" family banking pieces and his celebration of Britain as a multi-cultural society, even more relevant now since the election of the first UK representative from the far right wing BNP party.

all photos: NoLionsInEngland

Royal Albert Hall - LOAD

2009-06-22T22:52:00.006+01:00

The Wonderland Collective
The Royal Albert Hall, London
22 June 2009 – only!

The Royal Albert Hall has an almost un-paralleled status in the history of high-brow entertainment and in its’ 138 years has hosted some of the truely iconic performers. And my kids did a percussion workshop and this is the story of how a troupe of stencil based urban artists came to together to pay tribute to them.

Under the Albert Hall is one of those backstage areas most of us never get to see, a place where artic lorries transport huge stage sets and overblown egos, also known as a loading bay. The Wonderland Collective were commissioned to create an enormous freize in the loading bay, hence the title of the opening, as tribute to the hall’s own history and today the fruits of their squirts were on show to the public for one day only.

Load

The beauty of this work is that the real legends, those icons from the pioneering days when British bands ruled the world and American torch singers and balladeers found their audience in the UK remain legends to many generations. Their famous poses and celebrate moments from the archives still have the power to thrill.

Bob, Elton and The Bolshoi Ballet

The installation splits into four distinct elements. There is the Icon wall featuring a montage of giants and Jay Z. Painters on this wall included Grafter and Eyesaw.

Roger Daltry, Muhammed Ali, Noel, Shirley, Jimi, Jay Z, Pavrotti and Frank

Opposite this curve piece is an elongated timeline featuring luminaries such as Paul Weller, Elton John, Jimi, Mick, The Beatles, Eric Clapton and Einstein, the last somewhat out of context but apparently he spoke at the Albert Hall before the outbreak of World War II.

The Beatles, Albert Einstein, Eric Clapton

The third wall looks somewhat spartan, with a collection of translucent Union flags arranged either side of a silhouette of Henry Wood conducting the BBC Proms under a large RAH motif and some popular classical musicians.

Vanessa Mae, Andre Previn

Apart from the stars from the entertainment business, the mural also pays homage to the many others who have used the RAH either temporarily as a passing moment in history or routinely as a local albeit remarkably specialised amenity – the suffragettes, majorettes and brass band competitors, children and ....er.... sumo wrestlers.

The turnout was impressive and varied, opening a behind the scenes space in a location like the Royal Albert Hall to show new paintings of everyone’s heroes draws a fresh crowd considerably different to that found slumped in the gutters in Shoreditch after a Pure Evil opening on a Thursday night.

Naomi, Mick, Winston Churchill, Basket players, Bob and The Bolshoi

The illuminations were a tribute to the fact that one of the first displays of electric lighting was held at the Royal Albert Hall and also explain the eery bluish tint in the pics.

The work will remain on the walls for ever, locked behind the private doors and out of sight from the public. You have to envy the sense of historic achievement The Wonderland Collective must enjoy, they have created something that is destined to last, something to be viewed for decades and decades by generations of roadies and drivers.

For the record, street/urban artists who contributed to this wall, the members of The Wonderland Collective (and possibly some friends) were: Ben Slow, Snik, Blam, Finbarr DAC, Grafter, Eyesaw, DanK, DBO and Babel.

C215 - Shoeshiners

2009-06-21T21:34:00.009+01:00

Signal Gallery, London
19 June – 11 July

All photos: NoLionsInEngland except Romanywg and Artbleat where noted

There are only a few people in any art niche who can be said to set benchmarks, who are the constellation in the heavens that every looks up and points at. In the world of street art stencilism, C215 is one of those novas.

Hailing from France with a background that might described as challenged, C215 first came to wider attention in London when he bombed spots east to west and across the centre with his trademark monochromatic stencil portraits featuring grizzly men, suffering but saintly women and portraits of his young daughter pouting moodily.

C215 almost always marries the subject to the location, the rough grimy street corners provide a natural habitat for gentleman wearing the crude, un-kempt look of a life on the road on their faces. From Morroco to New York, Istanbul to Sao Paolo, C215’s forte is seeking locations off the beaten track and not blessed by an over-abundance of first world consumer luxury (like Hackney Wick).

c215, Delhi, Oct 2008. Photo: Romanywg

C215 was one of the original stencillists showcased by invitation at Banksy’s Cans Festival in May 08 and his spot was one of the highlights of the best street art show of the year. The hyperactive and swift working C215 had by year end visited the UK several times and ran dangerously close to stepping over into excessive bombing which, unlike tagging, isn’t such a good look for street art.

C215 at Cans Festival, 2008

However, after a break from these shores, C215 has returned to London for this his first London solo show. The intimate space afforded by Signal Gallery has given C215 a great opportunity to demonstrate his art without the stress of limited time (he generally gets his street pieces done in less than 30 secs).

The most striking observation upon entering the gallery is how much richer the images become when C215 is able to introduce multiple layers, acrylics and a broader pallete into his work. C215 combines lush colours and characteristic detail in the stencil with a strong eye for composition, not one of his images fails not hang together in a realistic manner.

C215 at Signal Gallery, photo: Romanywg

Though the show C21 has been inspired by locations as diverse as Morroco, India, Afghanistan, Delhi and London, the core matter of this show is one man’s diary of international adventures

Afghan woman

Afghan woman has an ambiguity of possibly being a girl or young women with a wide eyed beauty yet her face suggests a calm serenity or perhaps a maturity derived from the responsibilities of running a household from a young age. C215’s pictures convey a emotional depth rendering almost all other stencil artists flat by comparison.

The time afforded C215 in studio work allows him to broaden his subjects to the wider scene and context of his portrait subjects. Apart from a rather oddly twee vintage London scene, C215’s grittily realistic life scenes are at their best when he is focussed on the working environment of his subjects from less developed parts of the world. In Painting In Mirleft we see a working artist but in a rather rough cast studio reflecting characteristically spartan accommodation but at the same time capturing the nobility of honest endeavour and a sense that even in outside the high tech consumerist society we take for granted, there is still call for artists producing beauty and culture.

Painting In Mirleft

Anyone who has seen C215’s online collection of photographs may have spotted that in Delhi in particular, C215 was captivated by the numbers of very young shoeshine boys working the streets. This feeds into the show n the form of several shoe-shine boxes with the personalities of their possible owners painted onto the fabric of their livelihood. If plight is an appropriate word to describe their condition, then the plight of the shoeshine boy feeds C215’s concerns. The work of the shoeshine boy brings someone on a very low income right into the society of the well off middle class, places him kneeling at the feet of his betters in society, indulging the shoe-wearer the luxury of a shiny shoe, a seemingly trivial pre-occupation in comparison with the knife edge hard fought survival of the rag-shod urchin at his feet. Pennies scattered around the box emphasise the in-equality of incomes and the scraps from which the shoe-shine boys must make their lives.

Shoeshine Box 1, photo: Artbleat

The nature of the image on distressed wood of the shoe-shine boxes revisited the collaborative sawn up cello done with his friend the photographer and street art documenter Romanywg and shown at Corked last year.
The show includes several landscape pictures. In the various trackside and train station images C215 seems to be responding to the very similar compositions done by stencil master Logan Hicks (see also Cans festival).

Austerlitz Station

Several images of street scenes showcase C215’s mastery of a certain kind of urban clutter, a dishevelment common to back street locations where functionality and economy are the priorities and pretty privet hedges and civic pride area long way down the list.

Five Star Carting

In Five Star Carting above which is based upon a trip to NY last year and wittily including a street C215 left at the scene , the observant may spy a cheeky nod to the reigning queen of the current crop of street art documenters which definitely wasn’t in the original street scene.
In the scenes which incorporate a vehicle, the ability to render a totally convincing metal sheen and the sculptural bodywork detail is quite incredible. The detail of the wrinkled clothing of the market porter and the detail of the toppled wooden crates and the street scenery visible though what may be railway arches brings in a phenomenal level of realism.

Mirleft Market

My favourite piece was probably one of the least characteristic of the show, a seascape with a view of rippling waves passing through the end of a (British?) pier, breaking towards rocks in the foreground and coming in from the horizon behind. The image don on found board dissolves and softens towards the edges creating a sort of sun falling into the sea with encroaching darkness looming overhead. There is only one thing to quibble within this image and this is the case in several of the pictures, the C215 stencil looks in-appropriately heavy and oversize.

Seascape

There are only a limited number of stencillists – Logan Hicks, Artiste Ouvrier among others, who can cut a stencil with the intricacy and realism of C215 and the art of his images probably surpasses even those masters. I thought my days of being wowed by stencil artists had passed so this collection is not only a delight to behold but is a pleasant surprise too.

The set of pics from the show can be seen here and pics of C215’s London street work over the past year or so can be seen here

Rowdy - Never Smile At A Crocodile

2009-06-07T20:09:00.008+01:00

Sartorial Gallery
London
4 June – 27 June 2009

all photos: NoLionsInEngland except Romanywg where noted

Burning Candy crew of Bristol and London has knack for pleasing both fans of graff and street art. A crew show in October 08 was followed in short order by a Sweet Toof solo show in Dec/January and now it’s Rowdy’s turn to rock his skills at Sartorial Gallery in London.

On the streets, Rowdy is best known for his crocodiles with their oversize teeth and luminous eyes.

Burning Candy – Brick Lane, London

Occasionally cameos come from a scraggy wild faced fox and a prickly hedgehog, which like the crocs are invariably given menacing snarls and grins.

Rowdy/Sweet Toof

Rowdy/Sweet Toof/Cyclops/DScreet

Recent isolated examples of indoor daubings which have cropped up at urban art auctions have suggested a preference for the abstract, it was a pleasant surprise of sorts to find the large upper room full of crocs and foxes familiar from the streets. Indeed, a very substantial mobile of menacing wooden crocs the same as ones which used to be seen glued to road signs, gates and doorways dominates the room. Little jasper will grow up a twisted and terrified brat after having one of these hanging over his crib.

Never Smile At A Crocodile

Rowdy’s anthropomorphised animal characters cruise an urban landscape of offices and towerblocks, the town is the swamp and the crocodiles are the king predators. Bold primary colours and a simple style gives the Rowdy panorama the feel of nursery book illustrations. Curiously, about half of the paintings are called simply “untitled”

Untitled

Rowdy’s vision is clearly a city environment where danger lurks. The menacing half hidden predators cruise the streets and hide behind buildings. What do they signify though? Burning Candy gallery work has historically empathised with the underdog, the outcast and the outlaw, so possibly Rowdy’s characters are criminals. Perhaps they are the authorities, the rozzers, the bodies who would love to catch graff crews in the act. One painting which does have a title is Displaced Bank Manager, the dishevelled appearance and manic stare conveys an idea of a fat cat on his arse through greed and incompetence with only his pension pot to keep him company whilst his mates the crocs continue to lurk deep in the streets. Hang on, we’re back to crims again, a classic case of mixing up your crocodiles and allegories.

Displaced Bank Manager

A trio of very large canvasses create a night time urban panorama, the black night allow the illumination of neon lights and buildings o develop a luscious glow in these pieces. The cities are built on rivers and crocs patrol these waters. This trio didn’t look like they formed a tryptich but that was impossible to confirm due to the crowds, that’s what you get you place the bar next to the set piece paintings. At least you didn’t have to walk too far from the front door to get you free beer, so who would argue that the priorities were wrong?

Untitled

Rowdy has a love affair with a double image composition. Street pieces often incorporate double ended crocs, twin-headed with no tail like in the Burning Candy Brick Lane piece photograph at the start, this compositional structure is repeated in the gallery where the cityscape often includes a waterfront, giving him the chance to create reflections. It probably not just coincidence that some of the best photos of Rowdy’s work in the wild involves water reflections.

Synchronised Swimming – Rowdy In The Gallery

Crocs In A Swamp (detail of original photo courtesy Romanywg)

There is a very architectural feel to the small collection of paintings downstairs which lift the paintings up from the pure abstract like a stone skimming over water. Some of the paintings have an incredible depth, the layers dare eachother to cross the room or burrow back into the walls. The pictures invite you to step into them, perhaps then to turn around and stare back out at the world, who knows, perhaps you’ll see grinning crocs and wild eyed foxes staring in.

African Fence

Within the abstract pieces, stare long enough and perhaps the vertical and horizontal impressions resolve into proxies for buildings, horizons and rivers (so, not pure abstract then)

Benfica

Late night car journeys, peering at beacons and neon signs through rainswept windsceens are darkly captured in Botafugo (a place in Brazil), at least that’s what comes to my mind.

Botafugo

You could lose yourself in these for hours. Where the sense of urban landscape fades away to leave just distant horizons, the trick seems to be accomplished by switching from well defined acrylic blobs and runs to bursts of spraypaint.

Untitled

Rowdy has an effective and evocative technique, but technically probably isn’t quite at the same levels of accomplishment demonstrated by Sweet Toof and Cyclops but that’s a bit like saying the Beatles weren’t brilliant musicians, the effect is the important thing. Rowdy doesn’t lose his street content or skills in transferring to the gallery yet the work stands well in comparison with almost all other shows flying the Urban Art tag this year. And you definitely have to see the pieces in person to appreciate some of the subtle layer effects properly.

Untitled. tinny by separate negotiation

The set of pics from the show can be seen here.

Appetites whetted for a recollection of the Burning Candy Show at Sartorial in October 2008 can obtain satisfaction here.

Sweet Toof’s ultrabrite gallery performance in December 08 went up and down, up and down till it was clean and sparkling.

Jeff Soto – Inland Empire

2009-05-18T21:43:00.003+01:00

Stolen Space Gallery
London
14 May – 7 June 2009

all photos: NoLionsInEngland

One characteristic of the austere and spendthrift new age we live in is that the great American giants of the urban art scene have been noticeable by their absence from London this year – give or take a Ron English show in the past week. Jeff Soto bucks the trend by coming to Stolen Space for a new solo show – hold on to that sentence, turn it over and over and see how many words make you feel gooooood.

Wandering over to the Truman Brewery last Friday to have a daylight peek at the show we un-expectedly find Jeff Soto merrily painting away on an outside wall, and some would have us believe that this is the first time in a long time he has painted without the benefit of a ceiling.

Jeff Soto Lives

Soto eschews the purists pre-occupation with the spray can, applying his acrylic paints with a “normal” sized art paintrush. The fine-ness of the draughtsmanship leads to a plea for loan of a finer paint brush, we didn’t have the nerve to make our offer of a strand of hair too loudly. I say “we”, this is the royal version as of the small bunch of observers I was the only one who actually bothers with a comb these days.

Greetings From California!

Stretching my employer’s patience over what constitutes a reasonable length Friday lunch break, I wander down to the Whitechapel end of Brick Lane and find two more Soto wall pieces. A third is Work in progress and a forth remains un-discovered –something to chance upon in the near future hopefully.

Soto’s “Inland Empire” show presents 21 new acrylic on wood paintings and a couple of small edition prints. First glance suggests a kind of sci-fi futurism in a world of ghostly plants, dark galactic spaces and furry mutants.

Love Can Surpass All Obstacles

Many of the compositions have a slightly bleak or post-apocalyptic landscape effect with recognisable “old world” features, a car here, telegraph wires there with centre stage taken by fragments of shattered remnants of a ruined eco-system.

Flag Carrier

Soto’s work is reported as featuring strong personal and political themes and with this show the chosen role is harbinger of environmental doom. Nature’s Wrath shows a fanged beast of various flora suspended in a demi-world of noxious fumes and sparking chemical eruptions set above a blasted landscape featuring a nodding onshore oil pump.

Nature’s Wrath

Soto’s concepts are painted at various scales, with orbital circles suggesting paths of atoms at the sub-molecular level, rising up to exploding cars at the human scale and Mother Earth bearing the scars of man’s poisonous destructive activity at the grandest scale. All on the same painting.

Decay And Rebirth

Motifs which recur include rictus grins of a skeletal gumset whether actually in a skull or in a symbolic world-as-furry-mutant, and overgrown shaggy hair, fur or foliage. In Self-Destructive, Soto appears to reference a idea that nature herself lures us with her beauty but prompts us to destroy it to access her rich minerals, woods and oils.

Self Destructive

Scrutiny of the detail reveal an astonishing precision to the painting, an illustrator’s skilled hand being very evident. Although the themes are dark and dense, the paintings themselves posses a wonderful warmth.

Diamonds (detail)

Many of the paintings are done with a very surrealist composition with fantasy futuristic overtones. One tends to be reminded of the lurid covers of books in that certain section of the municipal library where only the sci-fi geek, the day-of-the-triffids nerd and the lost dare wander.

I.E. Moon

Furry animals and shaggy haired humans populate some of the pictures, the tufted fleece of these figures echoes something like the accepted representation of a mammoth’s coat (how do the palaeontologists know what that looked like?), perhaps in Soto’s future world our fate has been to endure a reverse evolution to survive the perilous environment he has created. It is not clear in the “Self Portrait” is Soto beating his breast and accepting blame or pleading victim status. At first glance I thought he had painted himself enjoying a toke through his pre-neanderthal beard.

Riverside Self Portrait

Fantasy art, sci-fi books and comics are the last refuge of the irretrievably adolescent and I have never been able to get any further than Douglas Adams, so it comes as a shock to me to find that I love Jeff Soto’s work. “Inland Empires” was so good it prompted something that the last dozen shows since Kid Acne at Stella Dore have failed to do – it restored my enthusiasm for uploading a few pics and banging out a few words.

Turqoise Skull

Words can’t do justice to either the content of Soto’s painting or to the beauty of his craft so compensate for the inadequacies of the write up by checking a set of show pics here:

The Ti(des)zer...They Are A Changing? ?

2009-05-06T00:18:00.004+01:00

A fairly prominent wall in Shoreditch, almost a whole building 'taken out'. . . HA and ID crews in attendance....

Buffed by the trigger happy council boys like everything else? Who knows!

But by christ if this is the shape of the future state of Shoreditch, I like it!

Kid Acne – Smoke And Mirrors

2009-04-09T00:56:00.005+01:00

Stella Dore Gallery
Rivington St, London
2-25 April 2009

all photos: NoLionsInEngland

You can take the kid off the street but you shouldn’t take the street out of the Kid. Sheffield’s renaissance man Kid Acne covers the graffiti, gallery artist, music producer and DJ hipness angles and has staged his first London solo show in London at Stella Dore.
Kid Acne occasionally illuminates walls of London with colourful masked cat-girls, showing great effect from an economic cartoon style.

Towards the tail end of 2008 Kid Acne introduced a 1 foot tall army of Bouddica-like women pasted around the footings of many London walls and pillars, All the women had warrior like garb, occasional lavish fur stoles, a few injuries and each carried a sword. It was clear they were by Kid Acne but not exactly clear what these women were about.

Kid Acne’s first London solo show opened at Stella Dore gallery, so achingly hip it even has paps staking out the Eine-painted front door. Street Artists are under pressure these days to have a few more tricks up their Kangol sleeves than just a few stencils on canvas and, luckily, Kid Acne has mounted three light boxes just inside the door. Why lucky? Well as soon as the gallery doors admit the first few rubber-neckers a machine hic-ups quantities of dry ice Spinal Tap would be embarrassed by, the diffused glow from the light-boxes casts a lighthouse beam guiding Shoreditch’s cool and thirsty to the buckets of beer.

The lightboxes have a collection of black images which at first glance seem to reference some runic iconography or Eygyptian hieroglyphics. Close inspection reveals a more intriguing set of truths.

Melhor Que Nada (Better Than Nothing)

A semi-naked women in suspenders with a crop pony-rides another semi-naked women with a halter in her mouth. Architectural columns and details, garden tools, blindfolds, strange garb, strange handshakes, symbols of squares and triangles, detecting a pattern?

What are the women up to? Well apart from the aforementioned sexual shenanigans which hopefully you have ceased drooling over, there are women gathered around a table arms raised, arms linked, clearly joined together in some kind of secret society, a coven of women involved in a séance it seems, communicating with the dead and raising their sisters out of their graves. The strange garb, one trouser-leg rolled up, the strange symbols, a builder’s square and compass, illustrations of hands joined together, suddenly blatantly obvious Freemasonry references abound. Those columns, they’re the five orders of architecture, five different forms of pillar and pillars are central symbols in the freemason’s cult.

Diagrams

The checkered grid below the blindfold woman with the hangman’s noose round her neck, that’s the mosaic pavement said to be the floor of Solomon’s temple, alluding to cardinal virtues and the kind care of providence. (Ain’t google great). The Freemasonary link sends us back to re-assess the ritual content in the lightboxes, ritualism and secrecy are key features of a Freemason’s gathering and the twisted construct Kid Acne creates here is that the rituals are being conducted by women. A Freemason’s lodge is generally a male enclave, so perhaps the women are taking the men on at their own game.

Diagrams

One or two of the details are actually more appropriate to an Ann Summer’s catalogue than the Freemason’s guide to symbolism. These toys may bring a smile to a maiden’s visage and present a message to the male of the species warning that he can be replaced.

Diagrams - Detail

The revelation of the un-expected themes fires our curiosity, feeling our way around the edges of the gallery through the clinging fog, now imbued with a much more sinister overtones, fingers tip-tap and fumble across a set of eight wooden etched Ouija boards. One or two of the boards feature Kid Acne trademark Warrior Women and the set sustains the theme of ritualism developed in the lightboxes.

Ouija boards

Ouija board of course have critics from across all religious and scientific communities concerned about occultish communication with demons and there are calls for warnings of the strong likelihood that your best mates may be revealed to be complete shits out to spook you by pushing the glass around.

Ouija Board

The set piece displays are two groups of 15 Stabby Women, single female figures, often topless, all looking alert and outwards, nothing introspective or self absorbed about these women, all bar one have swords, a few wear disguises, all have at least one aspect in which the erotic element of an empowered woman is brought to the fore. No there is no more powerful stimulant of the male mind than an erotic image with a story attached, imagery and stories go together in the world of soft porn. So the priest said.

Stabby Women

The Stabby Women clearly have a mission, possibly they are engaged in a quest or a hunt, or are on the defensive but the images lack a narrative that really tells us what they’re actually up to. The intelligence gained from the mixed images on the lightboxes may suggest their enemy is the male of the species, but faced with a Stabby Women on her own, probably when she’s at her most dangerous, there is only guess-work and you know how deficient in the intuition department men are.

Stabby Woman

The show print is a two colour edition of 25 screenprint in a choice of green or copper colours.

Smoke And Mirrors - Detail

Our bare-topped bandana’d Stabby Woman heroines get their moment in the sunlight in a pair of 4 colour screen prints produced by Choque Cultural of San Paulo, possibly explaining the Portuguese titles.

Melhor De Nada

A freestanding cutout masked girl, semi crouched on the floor emphasises the close links of Kid Acne’s style to pop art, in fact it is very hard to see the simple stark characterisation of the female’s distinguishing characteristics without Julian Opie springing to mind.

So there we have Kid Acne’s art. Very easy on the eye, the pop art stylisms are pleasing to behold, but underlying the images are themes of cultism, deception, secret societies, female ascendancy, ritualism and the occult. If only the story of the Stabby Women wasn’t so frustratingly incomplete.

See more Smoke And Mirrors pics here.

dr. d “HMP Brainwash Launderette”

2009-03-07T01:22:00.007Z

222 bethnal Green Rd
London
5 March, continuing.

all photos: NoLionsInEngland

dr. d is one of London’s more mysterious street art institutions, their (the mystery extends to doubt as to whether dr. d is singular, plural, boy or girl) manipulation and subversion of street billboards flickers at the edge of public conscious, playing games via a medium most of us have learnt to filter off our radar screens.

dr. d rails against Big Brother state intrusion, the supremacy of commerce’s self interests and suppression of basic human rights in totalitarian states. They probably haggle upwards over the price of their fair trade pint of milk as well. Scale is not an issue with Dr. d, simply the bigger the better. The most recent example being this response to Welsh “Best newcomer 2008” Duffy’s rapid escalation to coca cola bunny.

dr. d - Amy spreads those Duffy Rumours

dr. d has maintained long running poster campaigns proclaiming London’s proud boast as the world’s largest open prison and declaring Hackney and various other London parishes as The Sterile State.

The Sterile State Of Hackney

Last year’s Olympic games provided a focus for protest against suppression and exploitation within China and even its occupation of Tibet, dr.d pasted a blood slashed “Made In China” poster all city.

Brainwashed

An open and normally functioning launderette has been take over as the home base for a dr. d installation of anti propaganda propaganda, the attendant crowd being a mix of rough trendies and rough clothes washers.

Wash Thy Clothes, Wash Thy Mind

The walls of the launderette are pasted over with a montage of images of a 1950s stereotypical, almost mythological, homely goodness intertwined with the kind of proclamations a big brother society might make to anaesthetize a powerless population against the state’s power building activities.

dr. d - Is It Ok If We Watch

The government sanctioned erosion of the individual’s right to privacy and the conflict between freedom and total monitoring of private individual’s lives and movements is mocked through the strings of official platitudes.

London is touted as being the most CCTV rich city in the World and dr. d peppers the launderette with cameras which twist and crane to capture all our private moments, whilst providing us with official H.M.P (Her Majesty’s Prison) warnings whose subtext would read “you’ve been warned AND there is sod all you can do about it”. The kind of thing which infers a choice where none really exists, “eyeball scan Sir?”.

Biometric Scan In Progress

The presence of dark, shadowy spooks lampoons the invasion of our privacy by the state, though if dr. d was present at the opening he/she/they were notably camera shy.

Zero Spin

Even in a world where old municipal baths and school halls are being pressed into service as novelty galleries, the concept of staging an art protest show in a launderette is radical. Fears that the Brainwash edifice might amount to nothing more substantial than an insignificant subversion of a small corner of a laundromat are laid to rest by the comprehensive makeover given to the utilitarian urban space.

dr. d’s protest is that all your communications are monitored, all your movements observed and even the secrets of your DNA and the intimate patterns within your eyeball are now not only no longer private but they are actively used by the authorities to control your movements and your access to freedoms that previous generations fought to preserve. Brainwashing is a bit of a stretch, dr. d’s punk pro-individuality sentiment strikes a blow for an anti authoritarianism which is highly relevant in a world where fabricated excuses are used to justify excessive state control of the basic freedoms of London’s population.

More pictures of a launderette and other dr.d infrastructure here

More re-arranged billboards and commercial lies pricked on dr. d's website. Check the Billboards link, my kids laughed themselves sick at "I broke wind, will the poo fall out". I consider their education complete.

CEPT - Galaxy Rays Show

2009-02-22T02:47:00.005Z

The Long Arm Gallery
Bridewell St, Bristol,
20 Feb - 13 March 2009

all photos: Howaboutno and NoLionsInEngland

It seems like moments ago that Cept and Mike Ballard got up with a joint show in a Dalston, London workshed yet here we are 4 months later and half a world away in former police station in Bristol for Cept’s new solo show.

You’re nicked! – photo NoLionsInEngland

As in the London show, CEPT hangs gorgeous canvasses on the walls and indulges himself and us with a variety of mixed media installations. A vertical stack of TV screens inside a cage-door lift greets visitors timidly crossing the ex-cop shop threshold, flickering black and white film loops backed with crackling American voices issue barked ultimatums and set a jagged and staccato tone for the show.

photo: Howaboutno

Those familiar with previous Christmas group shows at the Bridewell St police station will need to know that the cells downstairs are not in use, though the rooms that are open retain a strong institutional spartanism. The main gallery room is shared between a collection of canvasses and a swirling wall painting. The wall painting echoes the style of the Dalston illusion room but is a minor fanfare for the half height cubby hole entrance to the installation room beyond.

photo: Howaboutno

Neither the sharp lines of the wall painting nor the strong colours of the canvasses in the main space can explain the dissonant industrial hum that fills the space, it permeates through from the direction of the next room but the half height door ensures that there is no preview of what lies inside, so the process of entering the room maximises the impact.

"Laplace Transforms" - photo: Howaboutno

Dalston’s illusion room was an empty and irregular shaped chamber twisted and distorted by Cept’s perspective juggling wall, ceiling and floor painting. This time, the space is filled by “Laplace Transforms” a bizarre sonic sculpture. Inside a glass fronted pyramid is a record player playing a piece of 7 inch vinyl literally to death – the needle has been replaced by a scalpel blade and a microphone picks up the scrapping of the record’s grooves, the signal passes through a voice changer and the amplified drone feeds back through the mic. In a cheeky nod to the artists’ graff origins the scene is illuminated by a spraycan lamp. It might assist interpretation to understand that Laplace transforms are mathematical operators that make differential equations even easier, used in among other things sound wave mechanics. Perhaps not.

"Laplace Transforms" detail – photo: Howaboutno

The pyramid shape of the sculpture references the All-Seeing Eye. Galaxy Rays from the painting above the record player erupt out of the all-seeing eye, cross the floor of the room in all directions, and talk across the room to a painted Transformer Sun King, the clever link being Ra as all seeing eye linked to a Sun King, Sun-Ra being one of the artist’s fav jazz musicians.

Sun King + Laplace Transforms– photo NoLionsInEngland

Whilst the eye takes in all the details and the mind spins, the ears start to pick up all kinds of slowly meandering harmonics in the audio. The gloom, the strong lines across the room and the textured relief in the floor all combine to knock senses off balance and make eyeballs pulsate, these effects are essential to the full immersive experience though you should bail before the diggery-doo aural illusion kicks in.

The main gallery contains a modest seven canvasses. The paintings are tense and dramatic and, with one notable exception, finishes are clean and glossy. The All Seeing Eye and Galaxy Ray motifs appear significant in several canvasses.

“Omega Supreme”, photo: Howaboutno

The Cept Super Villain’s spiral of despair continues, his face appears bleak and bitter, until he disappears in a series of body ripping explosions.

"The Cult Of The Explosion", photo: Howaboutno

The exception mentioned is this gorgeously grimy Super Villain portrait.

“Kyoto Crush” – photo NoLionsInEngland

A hunt through the adjacent admin office reveals a small number of painted album covers and a stack of prints and the installation room has a number of exercises in geometric patterns, and errrrr drips.

A flick through the pile of prints reveals a remarkable degree of individual variation thanks to the swirls of colour and bits of text added by the artist before the screenprint was applied, they look so varied as to be almost a numbered series of uniques.

“The Cult Of The Explosion” print. – photo NoLionsInEngland

A personal favourite among the paintings in the Surface Noise room is Transit Minds, the pyramid picks up on the show’s theme of the Galaxy Rays source whilst drips which defy logic to run both up and down make the red strip resemble a fat, pulsing noise readout on an oscilloscope display.

“Transit Minds” – photo NoLionsInEngland

We are getting accustomed to Cept’s shows having a coherence as a whole and an un-deniable beauty too, successfully differentiating him from most of the paint-drip-hang-sell urban artists. The bulk of the work connected with the show has been done after a short breather following the October show, Cept is un-doubtedly surfing a burst of creative power at the moment, let’s look forward to that energy being channelled back to the streets sometime soon.

Howaboutno’s photos are an institution. He should be in one. See more of his Cept Galaxy Ray photos here.

NoLionsInEngland's point and click pics from the show are here.