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.

Souled Out - Beejoir, Mau-Mau, Cyclops & Kate Westerholt

Souled Out

The Leonard Street Gallery, 29 Feb - 22 March

Lets start with the artist whose share of the show has the highest quotient of street art, or perhaps beach art would be more appropriate.

Mau Mau

Mau Mau has gone more monumental on major themes explored in previous work, which is mainly that sound systems rock (and bump, and grind, and skank, and boogey), weed is good, tinged with his anti corporate, anti capitalism, anti branding stance. Poor old Ronald comes in for a hammering, on separate large canvasses being chased by a polar bear and eaten by polar bear pups. Mau Mau’s humour and skilful political targeting is verging close to Banksy-esque, particularly in the way that concept and idea is triumphing ahead of execution.

Mau Mau’s surf background comes to life in three series of skate decks, populated by girls, a pingu-like penguin and Paddington Bear and suited vandals. “Will decode html for food” indeed!





Three vertical dyptichs of gorgeous girls can be mixed and matched according to taste or, if you acquire all six, passing masturbatory whim, compare the photos below of the canvasses before hang and then hung. Mau Mau knows artistically how to handle a pair of breasts.



hung for show

On The Floor

(Stop comparing those photos now. )

Beejoir

Beejoir collapses into a soft leather chair, next to his tired lady, shakes his head and mutters “fuck”. Everyone wants a piece of him, he’s had enough of the feeding frenzy, of throwing editioned prints to the piranhas, religion bugs him and he’s not sure he even cares why, and he’s knackered from the massive amount of work that has gone into creating this show. Then, just when things seem like they can’t get any worse, the gallery have over-sold the “clearly a Virgin” A/Ps thinking there were five of each piece whereas there are only five en toto. How apt that show title now seems.

Thankfully, his work has been worthwhile, the product is stunning and the media diverse. Starting with the monumental FIX suit sacrificed on a cash cross, on 4,000 individual gold leaf papers and a cross of dollar bills, there is more than a passing suggestion that Beejoir sees it as himself on that cross. The combination of flat gold leaf and a religious symbolism reference old Russian orthodox iconography. Religion raises its head in an assembly of 60 handmade ink stamps, neatly framed in Perspex box which show the repeated word God in mirror image. The hole don’t-like-church-on-Sundays is taken to its limit with the “Clearly not a virgin” (above) Blurry Mary which challenges the viewer to determine is it the immaculate conception being challenged or your swallowing of the biblical text.

From religion it is not too great a leap to the theme of deceit. After blitzing the locality with spoof headlines from the fictional Believing Standard, Beejoir has assembled a series of small editions of newspaper stand banners proclaiming various subversive and situationist slogans. The ambiguity lies in whether the satirised target is the newspaper owning media moguls and their political masters propagating diabolically corrupt hogwash and consumerist rhetoric for the masses, or is it you for believing what you read? Beejoir asserts the latter. You decide for yourself if the art below is street, hall of residence or bachelor pad. Bringing the deceit and corruption to a pinnacle is the Lies , present in both original collage and stencil plus hand finish form and the pink lettered editioned print.

LV child is reworked as a fleshed out 3D bronze sculpture, the texture of the face not previously evident in the flat two tone of the print emphasizes an almost bovine resignation or silent despair on the victim’s face. However, would you want in your home a sculpture of a young chap who looks like he’s taking a poo?

Absolutely the stand-out piece of the show, directly assaulting the huge reputation of Tracey Emin by adding a bare midriff track suit top, leggings and a ton of bling, Beejoir has transformed an editioned Tracey Emin sketch into Trackie Emin.

Dominating one wall are uniform skulls, rank and file, pressed from flattened spray cans pop riveted onto chopped off spray-can bases, in one fell swoop solving a recurring dilemma for environmentalist anti-littering recycling friendly graffiti artists (arf). The grinning skulls hold promise of a life after death which curiously is for some the purpose of their religion, not that Beejoir cares about any. In anyone else’s hands the whole skull idea would be considered as a retread but for Beejoir this is new.

Further new direction comes in the trios of plastic roses with tightly furled flowers made from actual war medals, suspended in a plastic (paper weight) style casting. Although the totality of the pieces is presented in the shape of a cross, individually they are just very cute botanical specimens with a slightly subversive construction, but not in any sense “street”.

Beejoir has built an enormous following, his unsigned Beejoir picked up a “Wallie” at the 2007 Urban Art Awards. This show shows his growing fearlessness, a rebellion agasint the pressures to feed the masses desire for more and more re-sellable print stock, his clear progression beyond the pure street art and middle-finger-up anti-populist attitude rocks. His part of the show does not pander to anyone, least of all his print swallowing street art fan base, any passing iconic YBA, any deity, or any human. Souled Out? No one can accuse Beejoir of selling out.


Cyclops

Mutation is a rather ugly word, whose use invariably means corruption, modification and scarring, yet it is the key word that Luc Cyclops utters to describe the link bonding the work shown in his second foray in the TLSG project room. Charlie Brown has mutated into a one eyed Cyone, his misfortunate down trodden and manipulated persona now mutated to have one enormous eye. A series of blurry tabloid photos of the distressed tragic-comedy femme-fatale that is Brtiney give a third hand insight of how her predicament is set up, compounded and exploited in the pursuit of paper and magazine sales. Cyclops contrasts this with attractive collages of other feminine celebrities though there is a hint that faces are some that fractured.

The most consistent motif is the defacement of images by disembodied Mickey Mouse white gloved hands. This works best on the Spike, Mike, Ike (Lee, Tyson, Turner) hand finished stencils and stickers on wood.

So Much Space To Fill

This show underlines a major issue faced by TLSG, within the gallery they have the ability to present a huge amount of art under one roof. This show comfortably gives space to four quite diverse talents (Kate Westerhaus cross-stitch tapestry..oh fuck, how can I write about that, what do you think I am, a dress maker????) linked by the Souled Out Studios banner. Once again the TSLG mandate has been fulfilled.

Sleevefacery

The floundering efforts of two blokes with no talent or ideas of their own to copy an idea tried out by thousands of others. The mercifully brief lunchtime photo session was interupted by from time to time by proper artists Mau Mau, Beejoir and Pure Evil, who all left sniggering.





NoLions' exhibitionist streak was flaunted again, which is surprising considering he has so much to be modest about. He seemed to think he could shamelessly strip off and pretend he had the physique of a 10 year old boy but the reality is he looks like he has just eaten a 10 year old boy.



The no doubt soon to be extremly lush, but currently dank wet cellar under Pure Evil's studio was the setting, whose warning shot as we cautiously descended the rickety woodworm rotten stairs was "watch out for any puddles, that's hydrochloric acid". . . . . . .

I'm Not A Pavement Sniffer, I'm A Pavement Sniffers Son

Just a quick Monday update on street life (which may or may not become a regular "thing")..... I think Monday is too boring a day to do it, but at the same time I hope at least one or two pieces make you smile.




Firstly, Dave The Chimp with another of the now numerous pieces around Hoxton by himself. This being the second colab with Spanish laaaydeee Rabodiga www.flickr.com/photos/rabodiga

Then two new names (to me at least) and certainly both leave me wanting more "Sofiski" (as yet cannot find anything else on Flickr....I must remember that other websites do exist) and some nice stuff from "Mr Ace" (haven't yet looked further into weblinks thus far)

Some long awaited action on the streets from Beejoir in the form of "Believing Standard" Newstand Banners. He brought with him his Souled Out Studio cohort and partner in grime "Mau Mau".....both are in town for this week's Leonard Street Gallery Show (more to come from NoLions on that front soon!) It was good to see some of his amazing styles next to some of the best Cyclops stuff I have yet seen on the street . . .or anywhere for that matter.

And then to finish that little lot off, a really cool Sickboy tag :)