K-Guy – News, Views and Sightings

Re-newed activity from K-Guy with the appearance of stencils and paste ups on the streets of London as well as finalising a lush new picture to be released shortly:

Taking aim at synthesised chemical ridden food (see the extras on the Supersize Me DVD if you don’t believe that!) as well as cultural homogeneity, K-Guy, or rather an overweight salad dodger, says Bin McDonalds!



Placement is everything as we all now, and K-Guy doesn’t miss his mark with this one, the City Road Shoreditch Drive In outpost of the Evil Empire being the target:






The stencil itself reminds us of his anti-gun culture stencil “Keep Britain Tidy” last year which still wears well today.





Busy times for K-Guy, the same night this pair of paste-ups appeared on Blackaller Street in London.





The point of these is to emphasise that today’s Britain is a multi-cultural nation where non Christian religions, international cultures and are integral and everyday parts of the fabric of our society. Liz rules just as much for women in veils as she does for Shire ladies who lunch.

We had the pleasure of bumping into K-Guy at a recent opening, at which he thrust a piece of information laden paper into our mitts and mutter “don’t be fooled, I really AM a guy”.


K-Guy – allegedly a bloke



The new image has been ummmmmm christened LiZLam, and it is soon to be released in a variety of forms through Leonard Street Gallery rather than Souled Out Studios (much like the original ed 3 hand printed and finished fag packets was released at Leonard Street’s Found Show prior to the silk screen edition through SoS).

There will be three colours, gold, silver and emerald, which doubtless will spark much pointless debate as to which is best. A small edition of 4 of each will be done on board and a larger and obviously cheaper edition will come on paper. The crown is hand sprinkled in diamond dust, so this time instead of hunting out that elusive particular edition number, try and get the heaviest!

Eagled eyed show goers may have caught a sneak preview at Leonard Street’s Souled Out opening of the first of the board editions which was briefly kicking around the floor before being shoved out the back:


LiZLam on board

Anyway, the full description of the editions is:

BOARD VERSIONS
TITLE: LiZLAM
EDITIONS: 4 x Gold - 4 x Silver - 4 x Emerald
SIZE: actual board size - approx 800 x 600mm - framed size = approx. 880 x 680mm
SUBSTRATE: 12mm OSB particle board
DESCRIPTION: Hand painted white emulsion + 4 colour screenprint + hand sprayed stencil text + diamond dusted crown
ADDITIONAL INFO: Signed, numbered and hand stencilled logo on the back

PAPER VERSIONS
TITLE: LiZLAM
EDITIONS: 25 x Gold - 25 x Silver - 25 x Emerald
SIZE: - approx 825 x 610mm
SUBSTRATE: 300gsm, 'Peregrina Majestic' - Pearl white metallic paper with a stipple texture
DESCRIPTION: 4 colour screenprint + hand diamond dusted crown
ADDITIONAL INFO: Signed, Stamped and numbered

You may notice there are two or three key bits of info missing here and for those, the wunnerful folk at TSLG will oblige at the right time. Soon. On yer marks!

Cless, Dan Malone, Dropmedia, Eelus, Gauche, Majowski, Mike Egan, Sebograficos, Twugraphic

Cement Gallery Group Show 27 Mar – 5 Apr

One of the first victims of the build-em-up-knock-em-down pump and dump street art print scene was Eelus, slagged off for knocking out large editions of the one image in too many colourways. No longer on the PoW roster having chosen to go full time and sell via his own website, Eelus has broken cover to participate in a mate’s group show.

Two notable performances to report. Mike Egan among his other talents is an embalmer. His art has a determined focus on death with abundant bleeding skeletons as ghoulish dead beings rather than just dead bodies. The style echoes Mexican El Día de los Muertos (day of the dead) iconography and calls to mind the Date Farmers as seen in London’s Leonard Street Gallery last year. Egan’s corner here includes half a dozen 12” square heavily lacquered death related pieces on wood, a trio of similar framed giclee editons plus a trio of very attractive errrrrrrrrrrrrrr..skull and coffin decks.

Mike Egan

Mike Egan – 4 Coffins To Bury


Dropmedia turns out to be a graphic designer and curator. Large stark rectilinear montages on canvasses feature sub-scale silhouetted men striding around or off the canvas edges dwarfed by dramatic and alarmingly red and black collaged objects. These semi abstract, original pieces are quite stunning.

Dropmedia



Back to Eelus, the newest image is his most intriguing and clever. A boy on a barren moonscape is growing some kind of crystal, or perhaps another planet on a canvas?

Eelus



Also showing well is the 4 colour spraypaint on wood Raven Haired though this is going down the girl with big hair with stuff in it route mapped out by others including Luc Price and David Choe, who both incorporate way more texture and detail in the bouffant region. Perhaps Eelus has long hair and this captures how he feels about it in the morning?

Eelus – Raven Haired


The rest of Eelus’s images have been seen before on his website, and the interweaving of the Jawa eyed skeleton gazelle walker with the rear end of the skeleton remains baffling even close up.


If naked breasts is your thing and lets face it for about 50% of the population that’s probably the case, then Cless can do something for you.

Cless: Horny – Only God Can Help Me


Majowski’s Eya is a beautiful evocation of a sun drenched urchin girl with a heavy Astec Mexican nest of hair fringing her eyes


Majowski - Eya


Dan Malone must have an audience amongst a certain cadre of bedroom geeks but too much of the stuff looks like the sub-manga computer game imagery churned out by the ton.pixel.megabyte load in keyboard sweatshops the world over.

Dan Malone – Youth 1 Red

Twugraphic goes the easy and ultimately sterile route of blemish and concept free laserprints mixing dangerous things like guns and chainsaws with crapping birds. It is easy to see the contrast but not the point.

Twugraphic


Also present, Gauche. Lush solid colours and predatory females..

Gauche – Black Widow


There is definitely enough exciting fresh stuff to make this show worth visiting though be warned that the majority of the work is shown in the soulless giclee form.

Lots more pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/11928372@N04/sets/72157604295296440/

Week and a Half Late Monday Update

Arofish "Scrapped" Solo Show

New Cross Gallery, 6 March - 31 March, 2008

New Cross is a place outside London, Sarf of the River. The underground doesn’t go there any more. Taxi drivers charge a fortune and get lost. On the A-Z it is in a wilderness zone marked “Beware dragyns”.

The first indication of any artistic endeavour is a stencilled bird skull on the façade of a starkly lit, small (north of the river it would be “bijou”), plain fronted (minimalist) shop. This inauspicious location was the right place to find ”Scrapped”, the first solo show by Arofish.

Arofish is one of our most ideological, independent and right-minded partition defacers. He also seems to come from the school of elusive-is-the-new-high-profile, not deigning to attend his own opening – we think. Efforts to expunge evidence of his identity extend to scratching out his own name and date of birth from the capture certificate acquired in Iraq, offence: “Anti coalition grafiti” – their spelling, not mine.

The main elements of the show are a variety of familiar Arofish images on found objects, a couple of prints released at the opening, a wall mural and an montage of images deployed by Arofish in various middle eastern states.

Let’s deal with the originals. One of the newest images having made its debut a few weeks ago on the streets of Shoreditch is Strawman, a metaphor for a disguised viral propagator of lies and harm. This Strawman on metal plate is crucified on a cross, has a crown of thorns on his head and birds looming menacingly on the arms of the sacred religious symbol. The target appears to be religion, specifically cross worshipping Christianity and the evils of evangelicism. However, until the mystery of the one leg is resolved perhaps the true meaning lies somewhere else.

My long-time favourite Arofish is Alas My Ship, perhaps this appeals to the nautical ephemera spotter in me. The problem with rendering this or any image on found modern sailcloth is that the material is designed to minimise stretch for achingly technical reasons we needn’t go into. The consequence is that it doesn’t take to stretching on a frame terribly well, and this one looks a bit wrinkled and puckered round the edges. The piece wasn’t for sale anyway. The least worse of a pretty bad set of pictures on this camera is the only one with the slightest glimpse of Alas My Ship. If anyone has some decent pictures I could feature here for due credit and glory, please drop me a line.

Another great street image recently revealed is the Plague Doctor. This simply is a beautifully cut stencil image which has looked stunning in every execution. The show version on an arc of aluminium is the mirror image of those previously seen on the street.

Queen and Country features the bug-eyed death-merchant pilot seen previously on the Eject and Survive print, this unique version has been sprayed on metal.

One piece which wont be affected by the oxidisation threat is Untitled, a parody of the self serving munificence of suits “assisting” the third world poor by providing them with arms and fuelling their guerrilla wars.

Stray Cats and Bag Ladies is a gorgeous touching image, this time on a lipped rusty steel plate rather than the wooden headboard seen at The Leonard Street Gallery last year.

Angel on a swing on shiny metal looks lush, and whilst one of these does bless chez NoLions in the form of the pearlescent print version, the resonance between the angel with her wings and swing, and the descending troopers gripping their parachute cords has always seemed a bit obscure.

The central motif of the show is She Walks In Beauty, a porcelain-skinned mini-skirted skinny waif-innocent seeming reduced to marketing herself by her looks, menacingly set against the back drop of a defaced police incident witness appeal board. An original version dominates one end of the gallery (pic below), a framed AP of the limited edition print run is hung to the right (pic above) and the images repeats in the show posters which adorn the street window. Curiously, the intensity of a series of dark slashes across the incident board appears in identical geometry but to differing intensities in the three forms, clearly a function of the different production techniques. The large unique version has been enhanced by some indecipherable marker pen tagging, its absence from the poster and the screenprint suggest this was added afterwards rather than found and smacks of straining too hard to annex further street cred for an already sufficiently cool piece. For the record, the screenprint is ed 25, three colours screen printed with the red added by hand by Arofish. The AP had an Arofish blindstamp but not the tag, curious.

The sharp contrast of the Strawman print is fantastic, sadly it may be destined like many other pieces vaguely negative on religion to be un-acceptable in front of the kids at home and shunned at work.

The beauty of Arofish’s images lies in the quality of the stencilling, originality of image, avoidance of the obvious metaphor and the way a particular message is softly transmitted without getting too strident or resorting to too many of the currently vogue-ish clichés. The only skulls on view here belonged to animals

It is definitely worth packing the Kendals Mint Cake and blowing the dust off the prismatic compass and navigating your way down to New Cross, the gallery is actually only a couple of hundred yards from New Cross BR station. And you’ll have plenty of time for a trip to the Maritime Museum after. Virtually all images guaranteed to be wife/partner/child friendly but hopefully Arofish has not lost his knack for simultaneously keeping it real. Set aside an hour to visit www.arofish.org.uk to find out more about Arofish and his exploits and observations inside Iraq, Beirut and Palestine, this will not be time wasted

The Krah - Upcoming Show

What do we know about The Krah? Most apparently, at least to alley way loitering photographers and graff art affectionadoes, he brightens the walls (and other found objects) of London and Athens with his un-mistakable style of art, an abstract fantasy character world populated by multiple faced limb deficient organo-cyborgs. The Krah works alone or with mates, and work in the wild can be rendered freehand using spray and marker pen or on paste-up. Low nipple count.






Brick Lane Crack den, with b. and Littll







He (or she?) has released a very striking limited edition print. One copy graces the NoLions collection.






The Krah has produced other indoor pieces, at least one is available (at time of writing) by hunting through his flickr photos.



In The Sky


Untitled



And now, the latest news is an up-coming show at the Gallery Of Pure Evil in Leonard Street. Thursday 22 May 2008. It's in the diary.

Oh F@*k And Bugger, I almost forgot the Monday Update!

Seeing as I did it last Monday, and stuff is finally hotting up (i.e. I have enough new stuff to show)

Lets do this. . . . . .

Banksy Back In Tahhhhhhhhhnn Again

Between us we have managed to get a few of them, certainly turning out to be a Banksy heavy 2008 :)