Showing posts with label Polly Morgan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Polly Morgan. Show all posts

Thursday 14 October 2010

Moniker Art Fair, Adam Neate, Frieze

Moniker Art Fair, 14 – 17 Oct 2010
Holywell Lane, London EC2A 3PQ

Adam Neate “The Flock Series”, 12 – 30 Oct 2010
Elms Lester Painting Rooms, 1-5 Flitcroft St, London, WC2H 8DH

Frieze Art Fair, Regents Park, 14 – 17 Oct 2010

{links above go to location maps}

All photos: nolionsinengland


Graffoto had an awesome day’s release from the grindstone today (Thursday 14 Oct 2010), spent hours at Frieze Art Fair, then cycled down to Elms Lester to see the 5 new Adam Neates on display, over then to Shoreditch for Moniker Art Fair and finally Choque Cultural Brazilian street art at Pure Evil gallery. Those legs need a rub. One day encompassed just about every valid form of contemporary art other than graffiti that is happening in London and, by extrapolation, the World.

Frieze is an overwhelming and exhausting experience. Quite a lot to like, quite a lot not worth giving two figs about. Adam Neate however has continued his trajectory and theme, creating anonymous portraits using multi-media coloured, painted, mirrored and transparent Perspex and metal. Compared to his incredible show there last year, there seems to be more depth literally in the 3D sense to the work but the movement seems to have been replaced by form, contour and shadowplay. At Frieze I saw nothing that was as interesting from an art perspective or as challenging, beautiful to behold and stimulating.


Elaine Sturtevant, Frieze


Reflecting on Frieze I realised that there wasn’t a single artist displayed who I would be aware of as being street or urban. Why is that? Culturally, graffiti, street art and urban art has an enormous fan base extending to almost anyone who has grown up through hip-hop, music and art in the past 40 years yet there is no evidence of this culture at the top end art fairs.


Adam Neate


The point of this write up is to highlight Moniker Art Fairs’ attempt to create a satellite urban art fair to bring this work to the wider more “received” art aficionados who this week grind the line between Cork St and Regents Park (Frieze) and to fill the void left after the demise of Zoo.

Throwing a few descriptive words out there to capture Moniker Art Fair:

Street Art – artists with work on display and or even creating live include, in no particular order Steve Powers, Faith47, Ben Eine, Herakut, Date Farmers, Jaybo, Swoon, Bast, Titifreak, Polly Morgan (ok, hand aloft – I don’t get how Polly Morgan fits into the street art scene unless the link is that you find dead animals by the side of the road, but I love her stuff so I’m not quibbling). If that looks like a list of weird unknowns to you, get thyself to Moniker for free and painless removal of scales from eyes. There is even a token Banksy (No Ball Games print) but that looks dull and jaded by comparison with the company it keeps.


Steve Powers


International: galleries from London, New York, Berlin, Milan, Los Angeles mainly focussing on their domestic artists


Jaybo Monk, CircleCulture, Berlin


Solo projects – a number of areas are given over to installations and mini solo shows which artists have really used to push themselves, this isn’t just junk that hadn’t shifted since the art bubble popped. Don’t miss:

Herakut – a section which reminded me loads of the red parlour room downstairs at the Dirty Laundry show in 2008, three or four delicious paintings and, must most eye-poppingly, a sculptural casting. Fascinating to see a characteristic Herakut animal masked figure rendered in 3 dimensions;


Herakut – Campbarbossa, London


Eine – a wall mounted collection of landscape font fetishising single word signs, some probably 10 to 15 feet long exploring a whole range of different fonts not normally seen in the EINE lexicon, plus a street alley tableau featuring a couple of shutters, a stickered and graffiti’d wall with props to a bunch of his London mates (not to mention I reckon quite a few websites guerrilla ambushing the wall with their stickers). I confess to being reminded of the signs Cyclops exhibited in several previous shows.

Polly Morgan – a coffin in a crypt erupting with stuffed chicks sits opposite a recreation of a taxidermist’s studio, creating an impact similar to the Banksy studio recreated at his Bristol show.


Polly Morgan


Films – there is a schedule of screenings of key films, I look forward to seeing Beautiful Losers for the first time and Bomb It II is being previewed.
Faces: at the opening tonight you couldn’t swing a cat stuffed by Polly Morgan without striking a key participant in the street art scene, an artist at your elbow, a gallerist smoozing, a photographer sliding off a bar, all forms of life present. We could call register but there isn’t space, doubtless those private view “court and social” photos will pop up on flickr.


Date Farmers – New Image Art, LA


Activities: Nicked off the Moniker website –

October 15th
- 11am-9pm/ Open to the public
- 12pm onwards/ Live Paint on Exterior Walls by Artists HERKUT
- 11.30pm-12.45 / RJ Rushmore [Vandalog prime mover} Inside/Outside Fair Walk-through
- 1.30pm-2.45 / RJ Rushmore Inside/Outside Fair Walk-through
- 5pm-7pm/ Film Screening - Guerilla Art by Sebastian Peiter
- 7pm-9pm/ Very Nearly Almost Magazine Launch - Guest List Only

October 16th
- 11am-9pm/ Open to the public
- 12pm onwards/ Live Paint on Exterior Walls by Artist CASE
- 7pm-9pm/ Film Screening - Beautiful Losers by Aaron Rose

October 17th
- 11am-5pm/ Open to the public/
- 12pm onwards/ Live Paint on Exterior Walls by Artist TITI-FREAK
- 1pm-3pm/ Film Screening - Bomb It 2 by Jon Reiss


Graffoto obviously preaches to the converted so we suggest that if you have a friend planning to attend any of the West End shows, specially Frieze, tell them that at Moniker there will be no queues, cool art and a far less tiring and twat filled (ok – you might want to paraphrase that part) environment that at Frieze and they will come away enthused rather than knackered. Tell them to go to Moniker first in the morning because in the evening they will be wiped out if they have been to Frieze first and they can swan around Frieze muttering loudly about the cool and cutting edge event they just went to out in East London, though its actually very easy to get to, about 10 mins walk from Liverpool street or Old Street tubes and after Moniker Regents Park is barely 20 mins tube ride way.


Futura – Campbarbossa


Tell them also not to miss the delicious wood paintings by South African Faith 47 tucked away on a very obscure wall by the rear fire exit, behind where the bouncers congregate.

In some ways the idea is not too dissimilar to The Thousands show staged here last year but the key is the variety that comes with the different international galleries and the timing to coincide with London for one week being the very epicentre of the international art world.

Just so you know, no one at Moniker or anywhere else for that matter has asked for this to be written or even knows that Graffoto holds this opinion and plans to write this. Graffoto will be maintaining its rigorous stance on not publishing flyers nor promoting forth coming shows with gallery blurb, we just felt on this occasion this needed to be said.


WK Interact – Carmichael Gallery (if memory serves), LA

More photos here

Monday 11 October 2010

Hell's Half Acre - Lazarides Group show


Leake St,

Waterloo
London
12 – 17 October 2010



All photos: nolionsinengland



Hells Half Acre promises to be a Halloween-ish subterranean wandering loosely based upon Dantes’s inferno.

You enter off Leake Street, now one of London’s premier graffiti halls of fame and therefore generally only worked by visiting writers from Prague and New Zealand. The transition from graffiti assault to Circles of Hell central you enter through a short brick lined cave where Dave Choe has been let loose directly on the walls. (er - perhaps i got the wrong impression, just hold on a mo...)


David Choe


Top highlight inside is the art taxidermist Poly Morgan’s almost luminous explosive cluster of stuffed pigeons. In a more radical and interesting world, this would be available in Ikea.


Poly Morgan


Conor Harrington has a set of 5 huge canvasses hung in the arc of a circle like something you might chance upon at night in a wood clearing just when you were beginning to believe you had passed the “virgins sacrificed here copse”. Harrington’s work is just made to be shown in this kind of moody The moody dank cellar vibe sets off the lush tones of Harrington’s work to vibrant effect, as usual.


Conor Harrington


Ian Francis’ work comes on in leaps and bounds, though I would now struggle to tell the Chloe Early from your Ian Francis in an “eyes-wide-open-but-labels-covered” test.


Ian Francis


Laz is your consummate leveller with none of the usual “don’t breath/ don’t photograph” preciousness, the website promises “Interaction with the works will be encouraged as part of this multi-sensory experience” though the only interaction I can recall was getting Lady NoLions’ camera wet in a drizzle installation across the width of one of the caverns. Apparently from a certain angle with the wind in the right direction it captures the light and splits it into its spectrum components though, as a visiting gallerist assured me, “it’s quite difficult making rainbows”. No photo.


Sphere with hypodermics – possibly Paul Insect?


Anthony Micallef’s work is getting more impressionist and darker with the increasing affinity for charcoal, like the Harrington the utilitarian backdrop really allowed the work to pop.


Anthony Micallef (fairly certain)


With a decent art show the experience is the objective dear boy, not the art education. So it’s a pleasure to confess that I couldn’t pin down a large number of the installations to an artists and then reading the blurb after the show, couldn’t identify half the artists’ names on the sheet.



(I thought this was Charles Kraft – but he’s not on the list) - UPDATE - Anthony Micallef - thanks "anonymous"


Mark Jenkins hanging humanoid chrysalis artefacts passed me by, they need pretext or context, are we looking into a human battery incubator or the pantry of some vampirish food preserver, dunno.


Mark Jenkins


Jonathon Yeo’s infamy rests on portraits collaged from clippings from porn mags. On this occasion he has pulled of a trompe d’oeil consisting of several layers of perspex with collaged nude clippings on each layer which for a person of a particular height, viewing from a particular point dead ahead combine and resolve into a pair of praying nude females. Tapping into lust as one of Dante’s circles this piece is amusing and delightful, if just a tad gimmicky.


Jonathan Yeo

There were many video installations in various terminal offshoots from the circles of hell, the one which captured the eye and the theme of death, torment and decay was a trio of what appeared to be back projected petris dishes with writhing maggots. You feel like standing there egging the buggers on to hatch.


Unknown (to me)


This is the hedonistic green shoots of the London art week, the week where bedlam meets capitalism in the name of decoration. The anointed PV’ers were a phenomenal clash. Italian suit-wearing suave faintly Mediterranean guys and their willowy black dress wearing Tasmins rubbed shoulders with un-shaven artists and the usual suspect forumite Laz fetishists. Graffoto – the blog that is proud to be plus 1! (thank you dear friend and “invitor”, you know who you are).


Vhils


The curation and staging of this show is superb, as you would expect from Lazarides. I was reminded of the Faile Lost in Glimmering Shadows show in that old school or Paul Insect's Poison in the old Kings Coss baths. Dwell on the quality of the work and the dream-like nature of the staging as overall I think this show may actually not live up to the hype, the creation of false expectations. This is an “experience” event and the experience is probably a bit conventional and tame when something more fiendish and macabre seemed to be promised by the allusions to Hades, not to mention the dire warnings that under 13s are going to need adult comfort and counselling. I suspect my kids would prefer to go to the London Dungeons.

More photos here


Vhils