Hit Shot Walls - November 2013

Words: NoLionsInEngland
Photos: HowAboutNo and NoLionsInEngland as stated


You didn't seriously think that cold weather would put Shoreditch Street Art into hibernation did you? Fresh colour and frantic activity sustain the rotating uncurated hang of energetic street art for which this area is reknown and we count ourselves lucky to have been able to capture some of it with our various cameras.


A.CE has been out placing paste up collages images left, right and centre and we can't pass up this opportunity to point out that Shoreditch Street Art Tours has a competition this month to win art by A.CE.

photo: HowAboutNo


Making a mark on Shoreditch surfaces for the first time was Borondo who is something of a star on the Spanish street art scene. Mark making is the appropriate term for Borondo’s craft which involves scratching paint off windows with a thick toothed comb. This was his first time painting UK walls but he hopes to return in the New Year.

photo: HowAboutNo



Guess which graffiti cubist had a new show opening in London during the month! Yup - Hunto, seen here collaborating on a mural with Millo who.... has a show coming up this month, who'd have thought?

photo: HowAboutNo


Parlee - Essex Rockers, daubed a Global Street Art mural hoarding which panel by panel is getting smaller with each passing day it seems as the building being built behind the hoarding approaches completion. Grimsby St will be a considerable duller place with those hoardings gone and it will be interesting to see if the current tolerance of the un-curated street art on the opposite wall survives whatever new businesses and residents move into that new building.

photo: HowAboutNo

Captain Kris enjoying a brief moment up on the same hoardings but round the corner on Brick Lane, this wall caused lots of amusement with the daily dismantling and rebuilding of the hoarding as the workers enjoyed a game of surreal jigsaw puzzle solving with the art on the panels.

photo: HowAboutNo


Stripy tights and stilettos usually means just one artist – INSA, however, we're not sure this poor unfortunate fashion victim seemingly stuck with a bit of Ben Wilson art work on their platform stilettos is by INSA.  TBC.

photo: HowAboutNo


It has been satisfying to see a couple of mural walls getting quite wildly dogged in the past month and CERN has taken this opportunity to pen a note-to-self alongside a nice fat dub.

photo: HowAboutNo

This month sees the long serving NoLions SLR being dry docked for urgent and hideously expensive repairs and we are taking advantage of the someone elses marketing budget to road test a Nokia Lumia 1020 smartphone, the phone Lady Nolions describes as way smarter than me. It certainly does justice to this luscious and huge Dan Kitchener tube layup mural.


photo: NoLionsInEngland


STRA cuts a pretty mean stencil and was quick to respond to the rantings of comic motor-mouth Russell Brand on Newsnight last month


photo: NoLionsInEngland


Ben Naz had a very busy month slapping single layer stencil street art all over Shoreditch, including this reverse stencil of young punked up Madge doing a Miley Cyrus tongue job.


photo: NoLionsInEngland


This year Mr Fan HC has painted some awesomeJeff Koons style inflatable animals and it's great to see him get up first with the yuletide references in this reindeer and santa scorching through the night skies piece. Fan has made a very interesting decision to retain Odeith's fox from the previous painting though quite what it does in the compostion beats me.


photo: NoLionsInEngland


Lily Mixe has established her trademark with intricately cut paper sea life paste ups and in case the size of these isn’t apparent from the surrounding stickers and tags, that piece is about 3 foot high and 5 foot wide which represents a mammoth Swoon-esque amount of paper cutting.


photo: NoLionsInEngland

Giles Walker & Candice Tripp: "I'm Never Shopping Here Again"

30th November - 12th December

Black Rat Projects/Gallery 223
137 - 139 Lower Marsh Street
London

All photos: NoLionsInEngland


Shopping is an evil which I put off until the need is way past the point others might have deemed a shop a necessity, as those who have checked my utilitarian taste in garms can testify.   A trip to a department store populated by Giles Walker and Candice Tripp’s morbid paintings and animatronicsconvinces me at least two other people also see the evil inherent in shopping.




Inside this department store we reel and recoil from Candice Tripp’s sinister enfant terrible paintings and Giles Walker’s beastly and at times fetishistic mantronics. The staging of this show will remind many of the Lazardes/Old Vic Leake St tunnel shows though this hardly surprising as we are in essentially the same Victorian engineering structure around the Waterloo train tracks.






In small nooks, many times higher than wide, suspended shop mannequins gave occasional shrugging-off-mortal-coil spasms, I was reminded of a slightly macabre Sam Taylor-Wood, which is a very good thing.






Many there covered their eyes at the gothic horror of the children, terrorising eachother and abusing passersby with twisted senseless barbarities. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.




Candice Tripp


In a room of child’s possessions, a trio of hemp sacks are suspended from the ceiling and inside the live contents squirm and thrust out against their imprisonment…they look like puppies about to be taken to the river but our suspicion is that the contents are not canine. We sense that we are in a department store where man’s suppressed depraved inclinations have been freed of the normal contraints and decorums. Or Poundland.




(to avoid disappolintment - this one is not animated)

This is possibly the darkest show I have seen this year and Walker and Tripp are incredibly well matched in their ability to discomfort us. Gloom, depravity, sleaze and sinister threats are the standard BOGOFS in the Walker Tripp store.   I received an email today with the subject line “Happy Shopping Day”…there are no happy shopping days, “I’m Not Shopping Here Again” is as good as it gets.

Mike Ballard: Advertising The Invisible

22 Nov – 29 Dec 2103

The Residence Gallery
229 Victoria Park Rd, London E9 7HD

Words, photos: nolionsinengland




Experiencing a Mike Ballard show tends to induce a profound revelatory consciousness and his latest offering “Advertising The Invisible” prompts the thought what a crackingly versatile word “warp” is. Obviously there is the connotation of intergalactic travel at a unit of speed probably faster than light. Then we have the twisting tone-stretching acoustic meaning where harmonics, sounds and pitches are all crushed together then allowed to expand into a vacuum exclusively occupied by percussive beats. A ship can be constrained, prevented from taking off can be tethered by a warp. Finally, there is the sense in which warped describes a fractured style of thinking, a deviant state of mind. All these possible senses collide, clash and rub eachother up in a Mike Ballard show, he is truly warped. Jesus weft.





Media is another multi dextrous word one could twist and apply in a multi faceted way to the content of Mike Ballard’s show. Media rolled out include photographic collages, hacked objects converted to …… well, receiver/generator/transmitter devices, musical productions, chromatographic representations of digital signals. It sounds like I am making this up so perhaps some of those media can be illustrated using the time honoured tradition of photography and in the tradition of several other blogs we know and love this time, it’s pure single handed wobble-cam shooting.




A large cast assisted in the production of various musical and visual experiments, all part of the soundtrack for a completely fictitious and obviously unmade film but in this PR saturated era of spoilers, teasers and studio twitter leaks, it seems a logical step to release the soundtrack before the film has even been conceived. The Aerosol Orchestra played loud, ambient and percussive, leading a line up including The Clapton Rifles and The Long Range Desert Group, remarkably, all of them composed and conducted by Mike Ballard. Ensemble members name checked on the band bio include stationary related fictitious luminaries such as Rack Staedler, Phil Edding, Uni Wide, Zig 50, Shu White and possibly Pete Pental. Graffiti taggers will recognise a theme.




Ballard provides us with a broad range of visual treats ranging from his black and white photo montages inspired by Carravagio, Metropolis and brutalism to the optical elements of previous hacked audio visual experiments with record decks, cameras and light boxes via abstract cosmic geometry.




Despite the absence of direct cross over to Ballard’s notorious graffiti persona, this show still manages to illustrate what a hugely diverse and accomplished talent he is. We avoided clichés such as “internationally renown” at the start of the article and I’ll be buggered if they are going to be allowed to creep in here at the end but for sure after setting foot in LA, Europe and shortly, San Paolo, it’s nice to see catch a Ballard show on his East London doorstep.

Hit Shot Walls - October 2013

words, photos: NoLionsInEngland

October sees itself out with a celebration of the macabre by the ghoulish, while people who aren’t street artists celebrate Halloween. This month has been a cracking month for new art and splashes of colour in our world, a large portion attributable to the Moniker Art Fair relocating from its previous village underground spot to the Old Truman Brewery and bringing hordes of street artists to the Brick Lane area


Alex Face


Alex Face (Thailand), Bon (Thailand) and Mau Mau (deepest Somerset) came together on several walls, this little beauty involved interacting with the iconic ROA bird, giving it a leg which Bon’s psychedelic bird chops lumps out of while Mau Mau’s fox relishes toasting the resulting leg fillets over a dollar bill barbeque, though quite why Alex Face’s baby is having it’s ear served up on a plate isn’t quite clear. It’s always great when new street art pays respect and homage to its surroundings like this piece.


Mau Mau, Alex Face, Bon


Alex Face and Bon also created a real squirt of colour on a much less frequented wall off the Brick Lane beaten track.


Alex Face, Bon


Shoreditch Junk on Sclater St provides a permission wall which somehow manages to avoid the sterility of other muralista’s spots. This interaction/collaboration between Skeleton Cardboard and Nathan Bowen elevates a savage and brutal skirmish between War and Death to new bloody heights.


Nathan Bowen v. Skeleton Cardboard


On the same spot, RYCA created a wall of clone troopers in a spare moment in between creating one of the knock out gallery project installations for Moniker Projects.


Ryan Callanan


During the night of the "Great Equinoctial Storm" of October 2013 the heavy rain and wind combined to jet spray large stripes out of the mural and Ryan was so taken with the effect he came back with a much drippier clone trooper paste up composition zig zagging around sprawling gaps mimicking the storm damage filled with a stunning pop art styled star wars stencil motif.


Ryan Callanan


Clet Abraham from Florence made a return visit to modify our many No Entry signs, sightings have been reported from Kings Road to Shoreditch via the City. Previous visits yielded more or less just the sign man carrying a heavy weight but this time Abraham has put up all kinds of subversions from his full repertoire, more focus on Clet Abraham’s London activity HERE.





Clet Abraham


C3 from Birmingham has been peppered all over Shoreditch in the past few months, the D7606 collaboration effect we call it, so it has been nice to see some of her own stuff on heavyweight parcel paper. She’s a heart breaker.


C3


Amanda Marie from Colorado USA was over for a Moniker Projects installation and she found a moment after that hectic weekend for a naughty bit of un-authorised stencil activity on a wall which years ago used to be one of the go-to walls for Shoreditch street artists.


Amanda Marie


Blair Zaye is a London street artist whose work appears infrequently but who does go back a few years, in October he had the interesting idea of installing a network of drainpipes which symbollically drained the surplus colour washing off the walls of Shoreditch, while this weary eye keeps an eye on proceedings.


Blair Zaye


T.Wat has been raising the bar on the street art sculpture game.  The welding, papier-mâché and painting involved in creating this illegally installed bomb must be seen to be appreciated and you can see just that by clicking here.


T.Wat


DScreet has featured music lyrics across his owl imagery before and now he leads the Lou Reed tributes with this beautiful Velvet Underground “I’ll Be Your Mirror” lyrics piece and in the process reclaims a long running Burning Candy/Dscreet wall from an equally stunning Soker Uno piece which also featured …. a mirror…cue X-Files music.


DScreet



Soker Uno



Another spooky Lou Reed related image…this banana by RYCA mimics the Warhol Velvet Underground album cover and was done as a side bar to the main Warhol-esque storm damaged clone trooper paste up mural but it was painted a couple of days before Lou Reed passed away.


RYCA


Trust Icon has a little pop at the commercialisation of street art, nice paste up humour from someone whose last round of street art was such a blatant commercial that he turned a photo of the paste up into the show flyer ;-)


Trust Icon


Finally, yet more by the legendary globally up artist Anonymous, the first an understated metal sculpture not spotted by many passing eyes, the second proving the enduring appeal of well observed and executed comedy genitalia


Unknown



Unknown


So the month of October celebrates death but unusually street artists actually ended up celebrating the hugely influential life of a genius lived to the full.

Hit Shot Walls - September 2013

All photos HowAboutNo
Words NoLionsInEngland

We are just over halfway through October so it must be time to reminisce fondly on the street art that appeared on Shoreditch walls back in September. We can also reminisce on the good old days when the part of Graffoto wandering round with a camera would let the part of Graffoto that thumps the keyboard keys know that the pics were ready in the draft box;-)

MJar put up some wonderfully hand coloured and spray finished paste ups then he got round to fighting evil nasties by putting his paste up faces over advertising for a record which was trying to pass itself off as street art.

MJar


Art Is Trash is still around and still looking like the big new thing in street art for 2013. The non conformist anthropomorphised packaging of his installations continue to defy categorisation as domestic refuse (white bin bags) or restuarant waste (black bin bags) and so create a pavement mess for quite a few days! He also takes up cudgels on behalf of the virtuous by assaulting flyposters placed over graffiti, the particular modification below were truly spectacular.

Art Is Trash


Is was nice to see Pablo Delgado back at the bottom of the brick canvas, this particular example of his work being quite epic.

Pablo Delgado


Our favourite Brazilian Cranio rounded off his visit to London with this scorching Mural showing hs friends the rainforest indians enjoying their drugg, pets, iPhones and replica kits in a denuded brown landscape stripped of trees. Sadly the day after he left some toys went to town tagging it.

Cranio


Unknown unknown

We love the cool way Miilo has transformed the Post office logo into a teeshirt design here

Mean strikes a blow for Shoreditch graffing

Mean

Binho brought a delicious characteristic Brazilian style to the streets of Shoreditch

Binho


Saki was pretty busy this month in particular doing some wonderful stuff in the windows and doors of a barred abandoned building but this isn't it.

Saki and Bitches

SP Zero76


It has been quite a while since a street artist provoked such unanimous hostility as 2-Square, perhaps it is the work on the walls, perhaps it is the dippy hippy over the top sheepskin look, I'd like to think it was collective critical horror at their piss poor painting slap next to the Roa Hackney Road rat

2-Square


C3's work has charmed us mainly by dint of appearing in D7606's old phone boxes and vintage TVs so it was nice to find this large size heavy duty one off solo piece of work.

C3


Also making a more than welcome return to Shoreditch's walls was environmentalist Xylo. It has not yet been determined if this tile is referencing the work of sculptor Jacob Epstein or a droid.

Xylo


To finish this look back, this manic cracker on the home turf of HowAboutNo from the cans and brushes of Rowdy and Sweet Toof


Sweet Toof, Rowdy