Diggin In The Archives Part 6

Is there light at the end of the tunnel? By the time you read this Boris should have made his “statement” to the nation and one suspects the tunnel will seem to be stretching much much further into the distance. Activities continue to expand to fit the time available and blowing the dust off the photo archive is a good a rabbit hole as any to fall into, so here is this week’s selection of gems from the past.


You wouldn’t bat an eyelid at a snorkeler (snorkelist?) walking down the road with a lion on their shoulders in 2013, it was Shoreditch after all. Twisted surrealism from Dal East.


Dal East, 2013


ACE is full OG London, his comic and pop art influenced collage screen prints were pasted up all over Shoreditch from the beginning. They still appear although nothing close to the quantity he used to put out. One of my all time favourite paste up artists. And there's Skewville , yet again, he keeps popping up in the archive photos. 2011.


ACE, 2011


In 2009 Graffoto founder HowAboutNo and I wandered Shoreditch and beyond on our lunchbreaks, chatting shit and shooting crap. Daytime street art creation was quite rare in those days and one lunch time we spied an artist in act of pasting up some big faces. He scarpered. Brummie Tempo33 told me a while later they had thought we were cops! Not many people wandered round in office garms photographing street art those days.


Tempo33, 2012


As I started to develop a little bit of an interest in street art I had a conceptual difficulty with stickers;,that fact that anyone could have put them up challenged their authenticity. Then I started to get my head around “Representation”. It would be very easy to upload a photo of a stunning mural by D*face, rightly they are appreciated worldwide but his stickers are in my humble opinion are way more significant to his street presence.

Liskbot’s hand finished stickers and paste ups go back a decade, still prolific!

The unknown sticker looks and feels like a corporate logo.


D*Face, Liskbot 2011


East London in 2011 was full of Malarky cartoons. Superficially they had the characteristics of children’s illustrations but close inspection revealed a real darkness. Often painted with compadres #Billy, Mr Penfold and Sweet Toof. These old Hanbury Street gates used to host art by great artists such as Donk , Stik, a Saki and Bitches and Macay collab, a Mau Mau and Alex Face collab and an Otto Schade "Creation Of Adam” masterpiece. And Curly ;-)


Malarky, 2011


In the next pair, the elevated elevation behind the grey gantry is the old Shoreditch Tube Station, closed in 2006. The first picture is from October 2011 and features a Rowdy creature and a piece by fellow Burning Candy crewmate Horror. The second picture dates from July 2012. The difference is the Olympics buff. One of these pics cost me a gorgeous Colnago Road bike, stolen by some Tower Hamlets low life cunt as I climbed up on the wall to get the pic

I am sure you don't need reminding, #fuckthebuff


Rowdy, Horror 2011



The Olympics Buff, 2012


When its good, Street Art can be very “of the moment”. The flip side is that years later the context or relevance of a piece of art may be forgotten. This Teddy Baden multi layered stencil features Mandeville, one of two mascots for London’s 2012 Olympics. Mandeville was named after Stoke Mandeville Hospital, the world famous spinal injuries hospital that organised the first games festival for injured people, seen as a precursor to the Paralympics. The orange flash represented a London taxi hire light. Mandeville was much maligned in the press, there will always be some mirthless killjoy. He didn’t have a good feeling about Teddy’s feline either.

I enjoyed the privilege for many years of submitting a selection of street art photos to the VNA guys for their quarterly zine. The vast majority of them went unpublished, there were far better photos from far better photographers to chose from. This is one of the unchosen. . . .


Teddy Baden, 2012


I took the liberty of visit to Shoreditch on my bike this morning, first time in over 2 months. Very little had changed, street artists have been socially distancing from the walls.  Notwithstanding whatever guff we get from Boris this evening I suspect there may well be more sucking from cess pit of my street art photos this week, catch them daily on my Instagram or facebook

Check out the previous weekly compendiums: DITA 1, DITA 2, DITA 3, DITA 4 and DITA 5

Art credits and links are by each photo. All photos: Dave Stuart

Best of London Street Art Part 2 - The Mural Bites Back

London has witnessed in 2013 a pretty significant growth in the number of large scale street art productions created with permission and indeed it seems, a growth in the number of organisations arranging spots for artists. Whilst Graffoto’s natural tendency is to prefer street art created without permission, we don’t judge just because something is painted without the frission of illegality, which is anyway a over-romanticised notion most of the time when what is really meant is “without explicit permission”.

We review the big, the wild, the bright and the spectacular here in part 2 of our review of 2013’s London street art, part 1 looked at the grittier less house trained stuff done without permission and should be read first HERE 

Words: NoLionsInEngland
Photos: NoLionsInEngland except HowAboutNo where stated.

Moniker Art Fair moved location and changed up a gear in October, attracting a large number of street art galleries and street artists. One of the best consequences was the lads from Souled Out Studios, Bon and Alex Face from Thailand and Mau Mau from the West Country painting this fun composition in which they gave Roa’s iconic bird a leg, which they proceed to barbecue.


Bon, Mau Mau, Alex Face. Also feat Roa, Martin Ron


Not far away Alex Face and Bon illustrate themselves literally delivering a splash of colour to London’s walls.


Alex Face, Bon


Dal East played a cunning game with a series of murals, staging a competition based around photographing all his fresh London murals which you could only complete by photographing the final hidden mural revealed at the launch of his London show.


Dal East


At the same time Faith 47 executed her most spectacular work in London to date, though the timing won’t surprise anyone aware that Dal East and Faith47 are a married couple.


Faith47


The most stunning project by a mile was spraycan virtuoso Shok-1’s ten part X-Ray Rainbows paintings which commenced in 2012 and concluded in August 2013. Not all of our photographs in this slide show capture the pieces in their best condition as the artist intended, sorry Shok-1 Sir.


All photos: NoLionsInEngland


Miss Van’s last outdoor wall decoration in London was an illegal piece out in Ladbroke Grove, West London which survived until about 2007 so it was nice that she painted this stunning piece in Shoreditch in collaboration with Italian sculptor Ciro Schu.


Miss Van, Ciro Schu (with Pure Evil mugging in the shot


Cranio visited from Brazil for the second time in just under 12 months and did a mixture of stunning illegal, permissioned and gallery work all based around the theme of the Amazon Indians indulging themselves with the gains from selling off their rainforest.


Cranio

The permissioned Cranio collaboration with HIN photographed below caused a little upset and mural organiser censorship, not because of the nudity or the suicide bomber or the obscene gestures but seemingly due to the pasted face portraits of evil dictators.


Cranio, HIN, feat Alex Senna


Roa worked his large scale magic in a couple of London spots, most visibly on the Southbank but to more gory effect in an alley on the way to Hackney.


ROA


Alex Senna seemed to get to paint lots of spots in the Shoreditch area, this one featured a then topical nod to the new born Prince George.


Alex Senna


Award for the least appropriate most thoughtless mural goes to the upside down break dancer painted by Martin Ron next to Roa’s bird on Hanbury Street, you might as well try to fit a Jackson Pollock and a Turner on the same canvas for all the relationship and harmony there is between the two subjects on that wall. After Cosmo Sarsen first in Bristol and Above in Shoreditch before him in 2013, did we really need another upside down breakdancer anyway?


Martin Ron v. Roa, no contest!


During the London Art Fair week RYCA put up a crisp clean Clone troopers paste up collage on the boards erected outside Shoreditch Junk following the McDonalds sponsored buff at that spot.


RYCA


A particularly wild and wet night saw RYCA's paste up virtually jet blasted off the wall producing an effect RYCA liked so much he repaired the damage by recreating it with paste ups and stencils. As a sort of post script note – the weather over the Christmas break has added real damage to the simulated damage!


RYCA


Zadok has hit a lot of walls, not all of them necessarily with prior consent we suspect but all superbly realised.


Dr Zadok


One of our favourite permissioned pieces in 2013 is the wild abstract assault RSH executed on the Lord Napier premises at Hackney Wick just prior to the Hackney Wicked Festival, a stunning visual attack on premises and eyeballs.


RSH


One of the less fortunate projects realised during the year has been the “rejuvenation” of Hackney’s canal sides. Where once there was un-curated street art and graffiti there is now, in the case of the old sugar factory wall, a huge mural painted by foreign artists (ok..Scottish in one case) and rumour has it then coated with anti graffiti paint, oh the irony. So, that’s the displacement of many local un-curated artists in favour of curated and protected outsiders, not surprising really that feathers have been ruffled in the area. Nevermind, it’ll look nice in the brochure and the Olympic Legacy reports.


Lyken, Moneyless


A local based artist who has been getting good walls this year is Dale Grimshaw who pulled off a couple of stunning gothic horror portraits, which is a good thing of course.


Dale Grimshaw


Dan Kitchener got a lot of spraypaint onto walls this year as well, it’s hard to decide whether to favour the underground tracks paintings or the rainy neon nights studies more, he does them both beautifully.




Dan Kitchener


Jimmy C has a pretty productive year, apparently the first of these images produced a 3D effect when viewed through 3D glasses, which could explain all those weird glasses we see people wearing in the area.





Jimmy C photos by HowAboutNo


Seems you could hardly walk around Shoreditch this year without seeing a new Lost Souls mural, bloody everywhere!


Lost Souls feat Captain Kris, SP047, Si Mitchell, Squirl


As usual, all opinions are those of the authors of Graffoto, happy to share ;-)

Happy New Year to all Graffoto readers and may you have a happy and colourful 2014.

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