Banger Art - Part II

13 Jun 2012 - 1 night only

then Lovebox Festival, Victoria Park, London

15 Jun - 17 Jun 2012

all photos NoLionsInEngland,

In case you missed Part 1 of Graffoto’s news and views from Banger Art, check it out here (opens new window or tab or something) for background and loads of artwork.

Eine, Will Barras, Aida, Sweet Toof

Did you know Pablo Delgado also painted? News to us but a reliable source identified these coarse and somewhat KKK channelling figures as by Pablo.

Pablo Delgado

Matt Small paints anonymous humanity, defusing the stereotype and reducing the inferred intimidation. In this show Matt paints on car bonnets and doors, revisiting a format he showed at Black Rat Press in early 2009 but let’s face it, there aren’t many forms of reclaimed metal that Matt hasn’t daubed. Matt’s technique is based upon blending various immiscible oils and liquids on a level(ish) surface then dragging the fluid around to create the image. A little information about his technique is quite irrelevant of course as these hanging works serve as a jolting reminder of the colour and beauty in Matt’s portraits.

Matt Small

One of the first examples of Will Barras’ work this keyboard botherer came across was a battered van at Cans II Festival in 2008, his stunning char-a-banc at this show was an even wilder and willowier series of ethereal wispy human and equine figures on a smoky abstract background. Should black, greens and cornflower yellows work together in a Ridley Walker-esque frieze of gothic post apocalypse characters and mad animals, perhaps not in theory but behold the beauty.

Will Barras

The underground car park is huge, let’s take a guess and say it might have fitted 60 to a hundred cars in the architect’s utopian scheme. Pillars, pipes and weird skanky flooded side rooms break up the space. Transits, that is lines of sight rather than Ford vans, offer all kinds of beautiful interactions between cars, installations and art on the walls.

The eyes have it: Jorge Rodriguez-Garada, Matt Small, Sweet Toof

The Borrowers style miniature figures of Pablo Delgado have been populating the streets of London for over a year now but the pavement level dwellers have suffered some tragedies with spectacular lorry jack-knifings and terrorisation by Aida’s oversize dayglo queen of the jungle. It has the look of a cult B movie in the making.

Aida, Pablo Delgado

The car decorated by Pablo Delgado features a hugely intricate mankind-as-plague tableau. The human population squeezes out the animal kingdom and to escape their self inflicted overcrowding the humans scramble up the passenger side door (dear America, right handed drivers would find drive-by shootings easier with the steering wheel on the other side) and in through a hole in the window, to reappear out another hole on the driver’s side where they expire in free-fall, greatly improving matters for the rest of nature which now have more room to graze. As a fully thought through coherent composition executed in pain-staking detail, this stood out in exceptional company.

Pablo Delgado - passenger side

Pablo Delgado - side where the steering wheel goes

Back to Aida, the Princess of Screenprinting has done a masterpiece of pop art with more than a hint of glam with a glittery neon zoological kaleidoscope, perhaps the spangley gun on the dashboard even hints at gangstaaa! Rising to the challenge of the novel medium, Aida brought her screens with her and sprayed through the image with aerosol stencil style, bet that’s easier said than done..

Aida

Group shows generally give us the willies with many ill-combined artists chucking in lackadaisical “cluttering up the studio” pieces but in Banger Art, all the artists worked on site for days putting in shitloads of time and creativity. There is not a single crap “dialed-in” performance in the cavern. In the case of the artists whose work is familiar to us (sit down Dan Hillier, Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada) the concept was much more taking the refinements of the studio art to the car park rather than the usual cash-in taking the street into the gallery, except of course for Matt Small who routinely paints rusty metal in the studio. Good art deserves a great environment and this grubby neglected underground bunker provided a perfect ambience for art on wrecks.

Dr D

The potency for street art to play a positive role in a regeneration programme has been discussed before and specifically was one of the elements in justifying the use of the St Peter’s estate car park facility.  I am a little inclined to be sceptical and cynical about this but there is no doubt that the wave of positivity around this event, where the door was open and residents mingled and marvelled, creates a lasting impression that feeds into the necessary positive sentiment about the area.

There was something so right about this location for this spectacle, it will be interesting to hear from anyone how these cars fit in in their second incarnation at Lovebox festival in London’s Vicky Park this weekend, link up your pics in the comments below.

The texture, scale and colour of this show made it incredibly photogenic. More photos meaning other photos not used in this blog are here.

Ella (surprise guest)

With so much to see and so many ways to see it, there are several other great photo sets out there and each has a number of unique pieces not repeated in the others, check out HowAboutNo, Hookedblog and LDNGraffiti

Banger Art

13 Jun 2012 - 1 night only
then Lovebox Festival, Victoria Park, London
15 Jun - 17 Jun 2012

all photos NoLionsInEngland, except HowAboutNo where stated

OK, so who’s idea was it to mash up memories of an embassy car park (Banksy, Swiss Embassy, London) with the spirit of a secret NY subway station (Workhorse et al, Underbelly)? Step forward Nelly Duff with their one night only art on scrapyard fodder jalopies in an abandoned basement car park under an intimidating Hackney block.

St Peters Estate underground car park

Street art gets the setting it deserves in this underground swamp, it is filthy, reeks of piss in corners, had to be swept of needles and shit and figuratively is a million miles from the sanitised, optimised cubicles most art in the city is seen in. The walls are festooned with graffiti evidencing a propensity towards racism (NF), football tribalism and even burned out occult weirdness.

St Peters Estate Car Park: "they'll kill you...before we lay" apparently

This show is as much about the vibe as the art. Over this space is a concrete playground surrounded by high rise council flats.  Intended originally for the cars of local residents, the space became the problem haunt of junkies and vandals with a noted propensity for torching vehicles. Contributing nothing to easing the social issues in the area, the council sealed off the car park many years ago, residents who have lived in the blocks for over 10 years said they had never seen it open. Brutal walls and stark lighting lend a grimy austerity which fuels the sense of in-hospitable danger. Calcifying stalactites leach out of the concrete and drip something that probably isn’t spring water on cars and punters.  So it's a perfect place for some street art.


Aida


Ten artists jumped at the chance to pimp clapped out cars, though Jorge Rodrigues-Gerada confided he would have liked his to have been burned out and rusty as well, who’d have thought that’d have been too much to wish for round here. Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada is far better known in America where his forte is the top-to-bottom building end gable photorealistic portraiture done in charcoal. The rougher the surface the better he says, this car represents quite a different scale to his usual street works. The medium is charcoal on white paint in the style of revenge attack on teacher’s car. I love the detail of the photographer reflected in the eyeball.

Jorge Rodrigeuz-Gerada

Dr D never misses a political target and this week has seen a former Prime Minster of the UK demonstrate the extent to which politicians have been at the whim of an excessively dominant media baron. Politicians and the press are stable targets for Dr D so he/she/they (whatevah) must be wetting themselves with the revelations in London this week about the media and government taking dirty weekends away to finger eachother, while the media mogul stuffs hoards of cash in tax shelter hide-a-aways made from feeding us a diet of scandal, lite porn and celebs. The scary thing is the headlines pasted in the car are from real lfe.

Dr D - Tits and Farce

Eine’s Beemer has been decorated in a crystalline diamond pattern which originated from the new direction used for the background of his recent Lowrie Museum mural, The application slick and mechanical, the colour pops off the car though photos from the Lowry suggest that the pattern works better in lighter colours as background to huge circus font letters rather than the small stencil tags on automobile bodywork.

Eine - Diamond Beemer

Dan Hillier’s car was stuck in the darkest corner furthest from the bar, probably not being seen by many in its paste-up’d glory, which is a shame as the scary surrealistic fauna as humanity and dali-esque bodies are fascinating.

Dan Hillier

Toasters have thrown almost the full stencil repertoire at their racy looking machine, flames and flying stones in the form of buff toasters, abstract toaster parts and dayglo toasters spew out from the tyres of their car, there is no shyness about bold colours here. See how many toaster parts you can spot!

Toasters

The average man on East London council estate if pressed to identify the piece of graffiti he notices most often would almost certainly recollect “them teef wiv the pink gums”. Not content with just a car to batter, Sweet toof has boldly gone “all car park” producing a myriad of lenticular faces across several successive pillars, not to mention teef, teef and more teef everywhere.

Sweet Toof

Sweet Toof seems capable of transforming any paintable surface into a sickly sweet menace of teef, check the wing mirrors, the Merc badge and out of shot even a fire hose reel has been subjected to the slack jawed toof decay thing. Sweet Toof’s pimp mobile looks like it is venting pink vapours into the gloom of the roof as it positively glows with marshmallowness, has pink ever managed to look so malevolent?

Sweet Toof

Part 1 of this reflection on Banger Art closes with a selection of photos from ace snapper HowAboutNo. Part 2 will be with you in the next couple of days, you may anticipate more stunning photos and highlights from the St Peters Estate bunker.

UPDATE - Part 2 featuring Pablo Delgado, Aida, Will Barras, Matt Small and others here (opens in new window)

Matt Small, Aida, Sweet Toof

Pablo Delgado, Sweet Toof

Dan Hillier

Jorge Rodriquez-Gerada

More delicious HowAboutNo photos in a flickr set here

Mike Ballard I.D.S.T

Block 336

336 Brixton Road, London

1 - 29 June 2012

All photos NoLionsInEngland

Mike Ballard's second solo show this year, I.D.S.T opened in Brixton last night.

 The venue is a non descript utilitarian basement concrete box, perhaps a bit too labyrinthine to be described as a plain box, various rooms, slots and box rooms house a varied collection of Ballard’s lastest photograph collage and film experiences.  The centrepiece is a vast low ceilinged room roughly the size of a tennis court with 5 very large looping film projections playing on the walls of three sides.  The films are essentially process documentation of the creation of a painting.  It seems that in each one Ballard is studying the process of paint explosion, created by cracking open a spray can of paint on four spikes.  Each of the films bursts into life as the can erupts, then the paint is captured dribbling across coloured backgrounds, an abstract dynamic colour discharge across the screen. Each of the slow drips, dribbles and runs are mesmerising to watch, trance alert – no drugs necessary.  We love colour! 

 

The end result, the accidental by-product  of the hours of filming is a gorgeous glossy abstract splatter filled canvas displayed outside the film cave.

Films frequently crop up in the Ballard output but this is a long distance from the scratchy over-dubbed retro-future black and white sci fi edits seen before.    After some 15 to 20 minutes in the film area emerging into the comparative light and bustling throng of the crowd taking in the rest of the installations was a stimulating shock to the senses.

 Also featuring in the show are a set of photograph collage light boxes and the kinetic lightbox (circular thing on the floor) recently seen at Ballard’s Arch 402 show,  these photos below come from that previous show, the installation at Block 336 benefits from compactness and proximity which makes them relate better to eachother than as shown at Arch 402.

 (Not all these lightboxes are in the I.D.S.T show)

Also making a return are a trio of photographic paint collages on aluminium,

 Astro Traveller Far Rockaway; Astro Traveller Between Patterson and Benson

 

 The I.D.S.T in the show title is the acronym for If Destroyed Still True, its addition to a piece of graffiti abuse giving the slur a longevity beyond the mere existence of the visible writing.  The allusion is to the impermanence of the moment of creation in the fluid paint transitioning into end product, Ballard’s film brings about a recycling of those moments in the creation of his New Instruction painting, lending that fleeting point in time the potential for an infinite existence, he has the potential to recall those moments and recreate them at whim and for ever.  That’s what Graffoto reckons anyway.

 This show brings together his collage light box units, chromoprint photographs and his films in a more coherent collection that anything we have seen in the past couple of years.  There is none of the wall/ceiling/floor painted illusion room stuff that he does so well (e.g. Dalston garage, 2008) which neatly swerves the “one-trick-pony” issue.  Yet the film zone is a beautifully colourful, disorientating and immersive multi-coloured cinematic experience.

PS - ARTIST'S TALK, Fri 6 Jul 2012, feat Hall Of Mirrors

Last night (FRI 6th July, 2012) Graffoto joined a gratifyingly large standing room only crowd at Block 336 for an artist talk by Mike Ballard [, interrogated by Alex Daw].  Seems a good excuse to supplement our own guesses above with lies and half-truths from the artist's own mouth, not to mention better photos that weren't taken leaning against pillars and people.

Going back about 7 years, Ballard moved beyond his 20 year pure letterform practise into a broader fine/conceptual art direction including mashed up video making inspired by Stan Brakage.  In a 2006 video of a serpentine spluttering paint line filmed by a cam mounted on a spraycan, the focus is on the dynamic jet of spray and the surface transformation at the impact point, this is very much a primordial ancestor which has evolved into the the IDST installation.

Ballard's fascination is not just with the painting and not specially with the process, it's just the paint itself.  Random uncontrolled paint, released explosively from the pressure cylinder of the spray can and distributing itself according to the brutal laws of nature.

Its not just the motion, explosion and dribbling that Ballard wants to experience, there is the sound too, the sound of the can puncturing on the nails, the hiss of the paint propellant being released from the can and the splatter and drip of the paint hitting the canvas surface.

The physical characteristics of the space where the films are showing touched a an ancient autobiographical note for Ballard.  He grew up in a small village in the remote provinces and in his words, "it's hard to be prolific all-city when you are the only graffiti vandal in a small village" but the limit of the 13 year old's world was a rail track which passed through one of those cavernous box like tunnels full of pillars and this was where the delinquent Ballard started out doing graff.  This happy hidden practise ground was referenced in Ballard's "All of Everything" show a couple of years ago and the Block 336 space has a strong echo of that ancient spot.

The Cutting, detail from The All Of Everything Show, 2010

vs....

Hall Of Mirrors v. Mike Ballard, IDST film installation

The origins of the three chromotagraphic prints became clearer (as in, this time I can remember what he said).  Another Ballard film process involved directly painting on and scratching a super 8 compilation of fast moving fast moving cuts, this "spoke" to Ballard by drawing his attention to invidiual frames which got stuck in the projector, offering themselves up for longer scrutiny. Ballard got the message and created the Astro Traveller Far Rockaway images from those frames.

The light box collages are entirely found and appropriated internet images, distorting scale and deliberately mixing hi res with very poor quality pixellated images, dancing around Ballard's long cherished themes involving mysticism, hip hop, Sun Ra, Ramellzeee, mysticisim, tunnels.

Penny: "Economy of Scale"

Rook and Raven Gallery, London

17 May – 21 June 2012

All photos: NoLionsInEngland

Stencil artist Penny has captioned his Rook and Raven solo show “Economy of Scale”, it could just as easily have been “Hand Cut” as this description applies to every image on show and blistered, bleeding fingers must be entry price for producing Penny’s stock intricate multi layered paintings

Alice Before The Fall, 10 layer stencil on 64 dollar bills

I don’t know if Penny stresses too about simulating a link with the still trending street art vibe.   There have previously been some rather generic Kate Mosses stencilled on outside walls [WRONG - see comments] but this homage to Albrecht Durer’s praying hands down near Brick Lane from about 9 months ago bore a closer relationship to the art Penny has created for this show.

Penny, Brick Lane, 2011

The first thing that stands out is that if you are used to a diet of Banksy, K-Guy and Stewey’s Stencil’s then you won’t have expected anything like the detail, intricacy and graduated toning of Penney’s work.  About half of the work has been produced using 7 or more stencil layers, there is a defect in our language if we are forced to use the same label to describe Penny’s and Mr.Farenheit’s work. 

Medusa, 2 layer, spraypaint on glass, framed over butterfly

If Penny has one trait which might be described as an alignment with Banksy it may be an element of humour in some of the pieces.   A lot of the stencils are drawn on the front and reverse of paper currency, old one pound notes and dollar bills and the gag is delivered with the title of the work, including the “Penny Pusher” series in bronze, silver and gold seemingly touching on the Olympic theme dominating the landscape of London this, referencing the huge expense required to stage this sporting fete as Europe tips back into recession and currencies look doomed to fail. 

Maybe Euro notes would have potential for future memorabilia value as we drift inexorably towards the neo drachma and the nouveau Franc.

 Penny Pusher – Silver, 12 layer stencil on one pound note

Many people have made an exhibit of themselves with one or two layer stencil images on canvas.  The more adventurous throw in a bit ofspraypaint “hand finishing”, or as Banksy’s film showed us,  in Brainwash’s case you put them all on the floor and ride your wheelchair around while flicking acrylic in the air.   Penny goes the extra distance to embellish the routine stencil image, such as creating a masque’d femme fatal with a stunningly iridescent and REAL butterfly.

Reborn, 2 layer stenil, spray paint on  glass, framed over “genuine” butterfly

Penny has another novel use for stencils up his sleeve which is to frame the stencil layers alongside the artwork, the effect of depth and cut is a bit like those dissected antique books you see around, we love the effect of the layers, sadly that doesn’t show in the photo below which completely flattens the strata.

Maia In Spring, 10 layer stencil, spray paint, dollar bills

Skeleton Stencil – “Maia In Spring” 10 layer stencil

And for completeness, a couple of installation elements gave an element of interactivity, by rolling pennies in the machine you might get a Penny badge out of the hopper, couldn’t get near the thing for all the obsessives thrusting their coins into the slots. 

These “Penny Shop Pick and Mix” pieces invited you to select your own personal combination from 5 eyes, noses and mouths on dollar bills to make you own preferred Penny face combo.  The idea is that the choice is from an open ended but signed edition for the duration of the show.  For a mere £31,250 you could have one of each of the 125 different possible combinations and perhaps the artist could be persuaded to stencil a “CERTIFIED INSANE “ piece as well.

Penny Shop – Pick and Mix

The list for the pictures has the word “hand cut” against every single stencil image.  Penny is telling us he is a Master.   No prisoners,  no  short cuts.  On the end of Penny’s arm a very calloused exacto finger is plotting its revenge.

Kali – 13 layer hand cut stencil, spraypaint, uncut sheet of dollar bills

There has been an excess of reference to Banksy in this post but any artist operating in the stencil space has to contend with the enormous shadow that Banksy throws over the genre.   Rook and Raven is a large upstairs and downstairs space which must be a daunting challenge for an individual artist but there isn’t a crap image in sight, they’d all pass muster as fine art if drawn or painted by any other technique.     Then you remember this is stencil work and you have to admire the quality and intricacy of Penny’s use of the form.

Iris In The Dark