Brutal Lazarides Vinyl Factory Group Show

Lazarides/Vinyl Factory
180 Strand, London
Tuesday 15th to Sunday 27th October 2013

words and photos: NoLionsInEngland


A nailed on dead (literally!) cert highlight for each of the past few years has been the Lazarides’ offsite exhibition expedition which in the past saw the gallery packing their toiletry bags for Bedlam, The Minotour and Hell's Half Acre in the Waterloo tunnels. This year’s jolly is off to an unattractive grey former accountants’ office block at 180 Strand, London which sadly is just so plain and ugly it doesn’t even deserve the inverted poetic description “brutalist”.

This show feels more about how artists have harnessed the gentle light of the space than about responding to Brutal as a theme. Many of the works interact with the very limited light available in ways which throw their influence much wider than the work’s own footprint.

The one I kept going back to on both my visits (so far) is the awesome installation by Know Hope who grabbed the reflective oily pool gimmick before Doug Foster turned up. Know Hopes has always been strong on installations and dioramas but here he kicks things up a huge gear on an abstract emotional level. It’s all about missing parts not missing hearts, rectangular holes allow found views, found light rectangles and chance vistas. It’s about absences and the play of light through those absences played out with a heavy Twin Peaks meets Blair Witch Project atmosphere. Stanley Donwood will be tearing his hair out.










Know Hope


Next highlight is Lucy McLauchlan. Lucy brings a rougher looser feel to this almost immersive experience as slightly heavy and indistinct figures swoop and gyrate through this gymnasium for acrobatic goths. The movements and curves traced by her leaping dancing figures create a dizzying sense of sweaty chaos and the music from the nearby Doug Foster installation suited McLauchlan’s room more than it did Foster’s cinema.




Lucy McLauchlan


Having mentioned Foster a couple of times already it’s best to put that experience out of its misery. The slow churning light is present, the epic growling soundtrack driving the sub woofer through the neighbours’ ceiling has turned up but those infinite reflective surfaces are missing. What is left is a very very widescreen light animation, a bit like watching tv through the gap under the door. The revolving kaleidoscopic imagery seemed at times to suggest long leaved weeds waving under water then sometimes perhaps strange animated seed like structures viewed under a microscope, all pretty abstract but not sure that it achieved anything either itself or within the context of a curated show, two ways in which Foster installations at previous Lazarides shows scored heavily.


Doug Foster


Cleon Peterson had a very strong show at the Greek Street Lazarides early this year and proves at Brutal that this was no flash in the pan. His mural is filled with pain, brutality and a lack of compassion and it presents a particular challenge, to view the figures smoothly across the many surface fractures caused by a staggered series of wall steps, we need to lower our eye level to the same height as the traumatically assaulted victims of this tableau. Peterson is killing us.


Cleon Peterson


I haven’t seen any Brad Downey indoor work since the disappointing 2009 show with Stolen Space but his Tarpaulin Café here really works well as an installation setting for what appear to be photographs of Brad Downey urban interventions and observations involving apertures in those building site net fences which have an image of the façade they are hiding. He has in the past created these holes in the nets himself, that was his art but this time it seems he is finding the holes and highlighting how the holes tear a gash through the idealised vision of the “artists’ impression” that developers deceive us with. The café setting gives an collection of surfaces, textures and light and shadow interplays which have all the ambience of a poolside bar in a war zone, in a good way!




Brad Downey


Moving onto artists I haven’t come across before, the work of Ben Woodeson was multi-layered chin dropping. Plates of glass and light interact to impose themselves on audience and surroundings in ways which could be either lightweight, perhaps the suggestion of a long shadow, or really heavy as in “this could slice through you”. Best get your retaliation in first by simply standing in the way of the strong illumination, this way you change the light and the shadows, imposing yourself on the way which the art work throws itself around the space.


Ben Woodeson


Conor Harrington matches Cleon Peterson blow for blow in responding to the theme brutality, Antony Micallef doesn’ t take us anywhere he hasn’t before with his dark impressionist portraits while Katrin Fridriks brings an abstract beauty to the game.


Conor Harrington



Antony Micallef



Katrin Fridriks


What do you expect attending an exhibition called “Brutal”? Pastoral landscapes and whimsy this is not. For all the fun with light and shadow play, no illumination was spared for the impossibly dark installation notes taped to walls around the place. Although the core theme perhaps is not as strongly defined as in previous outings some of the installations and spaces are stronger, harsher and often far more subtle than the previous experiences. As with all the Lazarides’ previous offsites, repeat visits are called for.


Mark Jenkins (again, for me, it's all about the light and shadows)



Karim Zeriahen



Boogie



Pose



Esteban Oriol



DalEast

Brad Downey – “An Honest Thief”

Presented by Stolen Space
Old Truman Brewery, London
29 Jan – 8 Feb 2009


Ever been jealous of someone’s lateral vision, been envious of the gift of conceiving and executing simple, subverted variations to the street scenery around us? If you’re an ordinary guy and have come across Brad Downey’s street art – then the answer is probably yes and yes again.

However, have you ever been let down by your heroes or disappointed by the mediocre achievement of a show hyped up by your own expectation that the street work is somehow going to transpose to a white box gallery space? If you go to Brad Downey’s first solo UK show in Stolen Space, London, then again you may find yourself ticking yes several times.

Brad Downey fine reputation is due mainly to his powerful and bizarre street installations. Downey takes the power of the streets, quadruples the source and hurls it back at the authorities who provide the arena within which he works. There isn’t a road marking, street sign or rotating object (!) which is safe when Downey’s in the mood for an audacious installation.

To stage this show, Stolen Space has moved about 20 yards down the Truman Old Brewery to a venue about, and don’t get too precious about the multiple, say 4 times the size of their own permanent gallery space. Downey has installed two prominent features, both at heart are disappointingly familiar. Along two sides of the room are four screens showing looped clips of Downey’s trademark street installations.

The clip of the rotating advertisement hoarding which winds streams of coloured tape off spools on nearby improvised spindles illustrates the his ability to create something simple yet so unexpected as to be initially baffling to the observer, forcing the passer-by to deal with multiple confusions such as was this part of the designed purpose, if not why has someone done this, can you walk past it safely, what will happen at the end and so on. A replay of the tube station turnstile installation would have been even more impressive. The three other looped films (Scaffolding love heart, jumper coinciding with building flashing lights and paving stone domino tumbling) were all played at Downey’s talk as part of Tate Modern’s 2008 Urban Art programme.

The second major installation was the street sign sputnik cluster, an idea executed and shown previously. In this case, it was actually awkward to view that piece in a way that might do it justice as every sightline seem to be compromised by either pillars or an un-sypathetic background.

Downey’s street sign work strongly echoes the efforts of UK artist Michael Pinsky, or is it the other way round – I’m not sure but I bet Pinsky gets a damn sight more public funding than Downey.

The limited number of gallery works were sparsely scattered around the periphery of the room. In one corner, juxtaposed against a small screen showing of a DVD of “actual police violence” were two sets of editioned deformed “night sticks”. A pair of seal like canoodling objects ask allegorical questions of love and romance in a world of state approved brutality whilst the single stick hanging flaccidly over the edge of its plinth drew a parallel with the big car-small dick use of macho objects as symbols of virility and power.


Night Dick On Limp/Night Dick In Love (behind)

Obviously the pieces look very well made but the most thought was why should the word truncheon be so sensitive that in the US it needs to go in disguise as “night stick”.

A vinyl copy of the Rolling Stones double Album Beggars Banquet, the one with the graffiti’d loo on the cover, had “Downey Was Not Here” added over the picture in white paint. The artist has deliberately not integrated the added graffiti into the picture which actually is stating the bleeding obvious as the album was released long before he was born, but the idea plays with Downey’s own “Brad Downey Was Here” tagging campaign, which on the street captures the essence of graffiti at every level.

A 20cm circular tapestry weave feature graffiti style motifs, with the square composition curiously off-centre and partially obscured by the tapestry frame. Evidently tapestry embroidery is becoming this year’s painting on perspex which last year was that year’s found metal (see also: DScreet).


V Fresh

Other items include a trio of animal images superimposed on another animal’s skin a continuation of a familiar series and a child crossing sign in which the figures are escaping from the frame.


Animals That Crossed

And that really is about it, other than a set of framed signed photos of selected street installations from the Downey cv, photos of which can be readily found on the internet.

The flaw with the show is that Downey’s work is best done on the streets and best appreciated on the streets, that’s what street subversion is about. The show is a reasonable Downey primer for Vyner St and Cork St types, if any retain any curiosity about urban art. Maybe the sense that an artist has passed off a show which has required almost no stretching of his undoubted talent and shameless exploitation, indeed repetition of previous pieces will dissipate over time.

PS: no link to a flickr set of other pictures from the show, that’s yer lot. I’ve never photographed a Downey on the street other than his tag, so let me recomend that you would be far off better visiting his site to see a comprehensive history of some stunning street installations.