disCONNECT: 1 house 10 artists

 

DisCONNECT

South London

24 July - 24 August 2020

 

Crunching up the gravel drive to a flight of steps leading to a house in a posh terrace set back from leafy Clapham Common, we peered through white double doors in an anonymous raised ground floor entrance.  As a setting for a cutting edge urban art show it seemed quite unlikely, we turned on our heels lest they set the hounds on us.  A door creaked open and a voice called “Looking for the art?”

The premise behind "disCONNECT" is that someone with money has bought a seriously expensive house and prior to doing an iceberg basement redevelopment job has invited 10 artists in to make-over the premises.   Viruses escaping from labs threw a spanner in the works though, so several of the artists incorporate a sense of the pandemic in their pieces and 6 of the artists being based overseas had to make and install their work using Skype, like scientists cautiously tweaking the location of the reactor rods by remote cctv.

Herakut, Germany

 

The Art world is not providing too much in the way of real life excitement these days and while one should never confuse the art world with the real world, or indeed the world of street art, it was a pleasure to experience disCONNECT for real just before it closes this week.

If I had been asked 2 weeks ago to guess which artists would feature on my uploads more than once in the next month, it would have been a hell of a rollcall before the name Alex Fakso came up.  This legendary trainyard graff snapper specialises in candid portraiture; his  2012 “Santa in Camo” show in Kensal Rise indicated a quite idiosyncratic approach to subject as did his 2017 Moniker contribution.   In this installation crowds in the photos rush towards the viewer in a way that feels horrifyingly alien in these public-gathering avoiding socially distanced coronavirus times.

 

 

Alex Fakso

Alex Fakso

Seeing Zoerism’s geometric and intricate graffiti on the streets is a rare pleasure and his anamorphic experience echoed that hugely detailed style.  Anamorphic images are designed to be viewed from one spot and look a bit skew-whiff from any other, this image was installed flat on the floor and up against the wall creating this impressive 3D “trick of the eye”.

 

 Zoer

 

Herakut’s fusion of photorealism and spindly elfin characters in Davy Crockett hats shouldn’t work but looks awesome.  You are invited to sit for a selfie with the monkey in the nursery -  if your chess game is up to scratch.  The kids in the playroom have painted child-like drawings on the nursery walls, they are credited to a 7 year old Ryker but is there a hint of an insider joke there?  

Herakut

 

A double set of doors and a single door were shipped to Portugal for Vhils to work his magic, a refreshing reminder of his talent for “discovered texture” portraiture.   His mining into layers of adverts to reveal portraits works superbly where it belongs, out on the streets but it’s a bit of a puzzle why having an implausibly deep block of compressed billboard adverts would work indoors.

Vhils

 

The dark entrance lobby was made over by a collection of Mr Cenz’ cosmic ladies, UV light brought sharpness to the highlights that define the outline of the faces, an effect we love to play with when photographing his portraits out on the streets.  Unfortunately we omitted to get any photos in the lobby though the effect can be vaguely appreciated in this mercifully brief video snippet.

 

feat: Isaac Cordal, Mr Cenz, Aida Wild, Zoerism

 

In lockdown Aida Wilde railed against the reckless anti social behaviour of people ignoring the social distancing, lockdown "stay-the-fuck-away" instructions.  Her “Granny alley” installation in the most challenging room in the house distills a lot of that passion and anger into blocks of text and her emoji infused pseudo-flock wallpaper.

 

Aida Wilde

 

 

Aida Wilde

 

After years of vicariously enjoying Icy and Sot’s art finally we saw a piece in real life.   The dining table apparently was found in the kitchen, in which case it must have been a relic from the downstairs kitchen many years ago.  The beautifully conceived and executed articulated plates and cutlery apparently represent capitalism with the extension leaves up and a full plate on the table.  With the extension down symbolised socialism, in which case this neither-up-nor-down configuration pretty much sums up post-Corbyn Labour.

Icy and Sot

 

Issac Cordal’s morose concrete figures endured this Summer’s monsoon in the garden and just about maintained their social distance in a gloomy basement.

 Isaac Cordal

 

Flock was clearly in vogue when the house was last given a decor update as the pattern recurs in several of the installations.  Adam Neate bid for the window blinds and the colour and texture makes a great skin motif in his ghostly portraiture

 

Adam Neate

 

This show exceeded expectations, though that says more about our expectations than the artists involved. The unbalanced capitalisation of the show title exhorts to us to somehow re-connect in these desperate times where isolation is salvation and this show is worth connecting with.  Time is running out though and indeed thanks to covid restrictions tickets are very limited.

All photos: Dave Stuart

Diggin In The Archives 2

Another seven days of posting photos of street art dredged from the archives. In lockdown you have plenty of time with your thoughts and the wandering mind generates random recollections. Those which stand out lead to a photo being thrust into the limelight. So there was some kind of logical process behind the selection of images from week 3 in lockdown, even if the process is irrefutable evidence of lockdown fever.

In 2009 Jeff Soto painted some awesome street art in Shoreditch. Graffoto reviewed his StolenSpace show Inland Empire starting per Graffoto's wont with a look at some street art. At time of the review 4 pieces of Jeff Soto street art in Shoreditch had been found, this beauty was the 5th, his “Thanks London”. Ultimately there were 6.


Jeff Soto, 2009


On the Posher fringes of the Notting Hill - Paddington border this was an unexpected mewsy location full of character. Paul Insect's spider was the size of a small child and provoked the awe of this big child.


Paul Insect, Paddington, 2009


Vhils was pretty much the star of Cans Festival in 2008, he returned in 2009 and created some awesome art. This pair of portraits in Camden were amazing, the technique is basically removing the hoarding surface, like chiselling or drilling perhaps but quite how the patterned effect on the other portrait was achieved best remains an artistic mystery.


Vhils, Camden, 2009



Vhils, Camden, 2009


If interiors designers could replicate the distressed wood effect of 124 Hackney Road it would be in every wooden staircase in Islington - oh wait! Many many lovely pieces of art appeared on this façade at the beginning of the last decade, it is actually sad to see it looking so sterile these days. This collaboration between Ella et Pitr and Macay complimented that surface beautifully.


Ella et Pitr & Macay, Shoreditch, 2010


For many years my mental equilibrium was both preserved and yet shattered by daily breaks from the grindstone for walks with photography companion and art show/drinking/blog buddy Sam Martin aka Howaboutno. Anything could happen and rarely did. One lunchbreak we spotted a pair of traffic wardens about a hundred yards distant, something made us suspect they weren't run of the mill meter maids. Turned out it was Tinsel Edwards and Twinkle Troughton ticketing parked cars with spoof parking ticket/artworks. I still have mine. Bonkers but fun, these days its just charity chuggers and product samples.

Read about the ire they provoked on the streets on Graffoto.co.uk


Tinsel Edwards and Twinkle Troughton, Oct 2009



Parking Ticket



“Best of Times, Worst of Times”, ed 500


Is it an armada of invading toaster erupting from a portal or toasters being sucked into a black abyss? It was 2009. The genius of something so banal! You could not help but smile every time you saw Toasters sporting the colours of Wolverhampton Wanderers home kit pop up, except when it was in the away end cos that generally signalled home defeat for QPR.


Toasters, Kingsland Road, 2009


Phlegm, one of my fav artists, has been doing a very entertaining series of daily sketches of life in lockdown in his own unique style. Yesterday's was a characteristically Heath Robinson bike.


Phlegm, “Bike maintenance”, 2020


Here is a couple of photos which “interrogates the boundary” between hipster bikes and street art. "AMAZING" is by Eine from 2009. The dude on the elevated bike which looks like the prototype for Phlegm's drawing must surely have had an interesting time doing emergency stops (2008). In the background is a fragment of Eine’s 2008 EXCITING.

I could have responded to the theme with photos of street art where my bike accidentally encroached on the shot, got loads of those😂


AMAZING unicyclist, Hackney Road, 2009



EXCITING two storey bike, Old St, 2008


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

Hell's Half Acre - Lazarides Group show

Leake St,
Waterloo
London
12 – 17 October 2010


All photos: nolionsinengland


Hells Half Acre promises to be a Halloween-ish subterranean wandering loosely based upon Dantes’s inferno.

You enter off Leake Street, now one of London’s premier graffiti halls of fame and therefore generally only worked by visiting writers from Prague and New Zealand. The transition from graffiti assault to Circles of Hell central you enter through a short brick lined cave where Dave Choe has been let loose directly on the walls. (er - perhaps i got the wrong impression, just hold on a mo...)


David Choe


Top highlight inside is the art taxidermist Poly Morgan’s almost luminous explosive cluster of stuffed pigeons. In a more radical and interesting world, this would be available in Ikea.


Poly Morgan


Conor Harrington has a set of 5 huge canvasses hung in the arc of a circle like something you might chance upon at night in a wood clearing just when you were beginning to believe you had passed the “virgins sacrificed here copse”. Harrington’s work is just made to be shown in this kind of moody The moody dank cellar vibe sets off the lush tones of Harrington’s work to vibrant effect, as usual.


Conor Harrington


Ian Francis’ work comes on in leaps and bounds, though I would now struggle to tell the Chloe Early from your Ian Francis in an “eyes-wide-open-but-labels-covered” test.


Ian Francis


Laz is your consummate leveller with none of the usual “don’t breath/ don’t photograph” preciousness, the website promises “Interaction with the works will be encouraged as part of this multi-sensory experience” though the only interaction I can recall was getting Lady NoLions’ camera wet in a drizzle installation across the width of one of the caverns. Apparently from a certain angle with the wind in the right direction it captures the light and splits it into its spectrum components though, as a visiting gallerist assured me, “it’s quite difficult making rainbows”. No photo.


Sphere with hypodermics – possibly Paul Insect?


Anthony Micallef’s work is getting more impressionist and darker with the increasing affinity for charcoal, like the Harrington the utilitarian backdrop really allowed the work to pop.


Anthony Micallef (fairly certain)


With a decent art show the experience is the objective dear boy, not the art education. So it’s a pleasure to confess that I couldn’t pin down a large number of the installations to an artists and then reading the blurb after the show, couldn’t identify half the artists’ names on the sheet.



(I thought this was Charles Kraft – but he’s not on the list) - UPDATE - Anthony Micallef - thanks "anonymous"


Mark Jenkins hanging humanoid chrysalis artefacts passed me by, they need pretext or context, are we looking into a human battery incubator or the pantry of some vampirish food preserver, dunno.


Mark Jenkins


Jonathon Yeo’s infamy rests on portraits collaged from clippings from porn mags. On this occasion he has pulled of a trompe d’oeil consisting of several layers of perspex with collaged nude clippings on each layer which for a person of a particular height, viewing from a particular point dead ahead combine and resolve into a pair of praying nude females. Tapping into lust as one of Dante’s circles this piece is amusing and delightful, if just a tad gimmicky.


Jonathan Yeo

There were many video installations in various terminal offshoots from the circles of hell, the one which captured the eye and the theme of death, torment and decay was a trio of what appeared to be back projected petris dishes with writhing maggots. You feel like standing there egging the buggers on to hatch.


Unknown (to me)


This is the hedonistic green shoots of the London art week, the week where bedlam meets capitalism in the name of decoration. The anointed PV’ers were a phenomenal clash. Italian suit-wearing suave faintly Mediterranean guys and their willowy black dress wearing Tasmins rubbed shoulders with un-shaven artists and the usual suspect forumite Laz fetishists. Graffoto – the blog that is proud to be plus 1! (thank you dear friend and “invitor”, you know who you are).


Vhils


The curation and staging of this show is superb, as you would expect from Lazarides. I was reminded of the Faile Lost in Glimmering Shadows show in that old school or Paul Insect's Poison in the old Kings Coss baths. Dwell on the quality of the work and the dream-like nature of the staging as overall I think this show may actually not live up to the hype, the creation of false expectations. This is an “experience” event and the experience is probably a bit conventional and tame when something more fiendish and macabre seemed to be promised by the allusions to Hades, not to mention the dire warnings that under 13s are going to need adult comfort and counselling. I suspect my kids would prefer to go to the London Dungeons.

More photos here


Vhils

Is Street Art Dead?

all photos: NoLionsInEngland


I come to praise street art not to bury it. If that gives away my answer to my own question fear not, for purpose of dramatic suspense the best is still saved till last.

There are a myriad variety of ways I can cycle across London from home in the West to work in the East and luckily today I was able to choose a meandering tour-de-W1 which took in two new pieces which I had spotted in Ian Cox aka Wallkandy teaser pics.

This Paul Insect was not difficult to locate (ok – it’s W2 but lets not quibble) and as I took some flicks the adjacent door disgorged a family of mum and three kids under the age of 5. They loved the art but hadn’t witnessed its creation as the kids asked if I did it, ho ho ho ho. Somewhere in London, a young family may now believe Paul Insect goes to work in Lycra.


Paul Insect


The Mode 2 piece is rather saucy and of course, being W1 I couldn’t get this shot without some damn gorgeous woman walking into the frame.


Mode 2



Mode 2


Lunchtime presented the opportunity for a 1 hour whizz around Shoreditch, wandering the streets is great for blowing through the synapses after a hectic morning and this time I had five specific objectives.

I met Fauxreel aka Mr Dan bergeron at Pure Evil’s gallery last week and although he has been a flickr contact for a while I wasn’t really conscious of his art, my ears pricked up when he talked of his plans for a paste-up in a grubby but frequently hit alleyway. Seeing a flick of the end result on unusualimage’s flickr put the idea in my mind for a shot as if the camera was the eye of someone holding the ladder looking upwards, the pic here is the full piece, the “propping-up-the-ladder” shot is here on my flickr. Tick the box marked “not permissioned”, always worth an extra star on the street art rating scale and also the piece works so well with the wall furniture so top marks for placement.


Fauxreel


Continuing towards Brick Lane I paused at End Of The Line’s Curtain Road wall to photograph some Aryz, Tizer, Probs, Nychos, Biser and Does pieces, when I chanced upon them painting this last week i got some comedy pics of a grass on a moped watching them brazenly painting away in daylight without a care.


Aryz


Just yards further on, there were the Village Underground wall panels painted last week in parallel with Probs/Tizer’s stunning “Shades of Things To Come” show. Got some decent pics of more Probs, Aryz, Snugone, Does, Nychos, Biser among others and this masterful and witty Tizer confection.


Tizer


And on, still on a 1 hour schedule, came across a very nice new Mantis, check the paths in the maze, they're not as random as you might think.


Mantis


Yards further on came across another Fauxreel that I hadn’t known about, so with this one there was not only the illegal aspect but also the chance discovery element as well, getting close to perfect (free hand spray required for top marks!).


Fauxreel


And I haven’t mentioned the two new (to me) Elbow Toe written word pieces or the Sinboy shutter character and tags, save them for another day though recently there has been a lot of pieces kept back for such “nothing new” days which have been a long time waiting.

Sickboy’s flickr streamed yesterday revealed a new Sickboy letter piece on a familiar gate – so freehand spray but not “chanced upon”, Sickboys part had been partially spoiled by someone tearing off the flyers it was painted over, perhaps an audacious attempt to steal the whole piece!


Sickboy, Word To Mother (I think)


Mr Cox’s weekend flicks confirmed suspicions this Vhils piece was only about 80% complete when I snapped it last Thursday but it was still worth strolling into the Old Truman Brewery to capture the piece in its finished state, my fifth intended location. Curiously the lunchtime curry stall often positioned in front of it wasn’t there, sometimes you get lucky (other times, there’s be a bloody white van parked hard against it).


Vhils (sculpted render)


How did I get to the Brewery from the Sickboy piece, well I paused and pondered - go back to brick Lane or round the opposite side down a dog-legged road between a wall and a derelict warehouse. Easy choice! Rounding the corner I spied a cherry picker up against a warehouse brick wall and even from about 100 yards at a very oblique angle there was no doubt in my mind what I had found.

However after a matter of feet I came across this lush Grafter stencil piece that I had seen pics of but whose location I didn’t know, this wonderful and peaceful innocence in the midst of the urban crush feels like a throw-back to a rose-tinted previous world where kids could play outdoors unsupervised and un-threatened. Try leaving your kids alone at that age today and people not only wonder if she is safe they mentally start forming the unfit negligent parenting accusations. When street art triggers reflections like that, it’s clearly doing something right.


Grafter


Finally, the crowning glory of the walk, the un-expected chancing upon a street art legend in the act of creating a piece which stands a chance of lasting for the life of the building it is placed upon. They don’t come much more revered than the legendary French street artist Space Invader and here he was in front of me, working with a friend putting up a piece which is going to be enormous when it is finished.


Space Invader


Of course, quite a bit of the art photographed today isn’t there by chance, apart from the “Shades Of Things To Come” show mentioned earlier, the Paul Insect, Mode 2 and Space Invader pieces are connected to Lazarides “The Grifters” Christmas Show” which opens this week. The joy of discovering un-expected street art and illegal street art creates a wonderful rush and whilst today my cup truly did runneth over, thankfully this is not as rare an emotion as some might have you believe.