Jeff Soto – Inland Empire

Stolen Space Gallery
London
14 May – 7 June 2009

all photos: NoLionsInEngland

One characteristic of the austere and spendthrift new age we live in is that the great American giants of the urban art scene have been noticeable by their absence from London this year – give or take a Ron English show in the past week. Jeff Soto bucks the trend by coming to Stolen Space for a new solo show – hold on to that sentence, turn it over and over and see how many words make you feel gooooood.

Wandering over to the Truman Brewery last Friday to have a daylight peek at the show we un-expectedly find Jeff Soto merrily painting away on an outside wall, and some would have us believe that this is the first time in a long time he has painted without the benefit of a ceiling.


Jeff Soto Lives


Soto eschews the purists pre-occupation with the spray can, applying his acrylic paints with a “normal” sized art paintrush. The fine-ness of the draughtsmanship leads to a plea for loan of a finer paint brush, we didn’t have the nerve to make our offer of a strand of hair too loudly. I say “we”, this is the royal version as of the small bunch of observers I was the only one who actually bothers with a comb these days.


Greetings From California!


Stretching my employer’s patience over what constitutes a reasonable length Friday lunch break, I wander down to the Whitechapel end of Brick Lane and find two more Soto wall pieces. A third is Work in progress and a forth remains un-discovered –something to chance upon in the near future hopefully.




Soto’s “Inland Empire” show presents 21 new acrylic on wood paintings and a couple of small edition prints. First glance suggests a kind of sci-fi futurism in a world of ghostly plants, dark galactic spaces and furry mutants.


Love Can Surpass All Obstacles


Many of the compositions have a slightly bleak or post-apocalyptic landscape effect with recognisable “old world” features, a car here, telegraph wires there with centre stage taken by fragments of shattered remnants of a ruined eco-system.


Flag Carrier


Soto’s work is reported as featuring strong personal and political themes and with this show the chosen role is harbinger of environmental doom. Nature’s Wrath shows a fanged beast of various flora suspended in a demi-world of noxious fumes and sparking chemical eruptions set above a blasted landscape featuring a nodding onshore oil pump.


Nature’s Wrath


Soto’s concepts are painted at various scales, with orbital circles suggesting paths of atoms at the sub-molecular level, rising up to exploding cars at the human scale and Mother Earth bearing the scars of man’s poisonous destructive activity at the grandest scale. All on the same painting.


Decay And Rebirth


Motifs which recur include rictus grins of a skeletal gumset whether actually in a skull or in a symbolic world-as-furry-mutant, and overgrown shaggy hair, fur or foliage. In Self-Destructive, Soto appears to reference a idea that nature herself lures us with her beauty but prompts us to destroy it to access her rich minerals, woods and oils.


Self Destructive


Scrutiny of the detail reveal an astonishing precision to the painting, an illustrator’s skilled hand being very evident. Although the themes are dark and dense, the paintings themselves posses a wonderful warmth.


Diamonds (detail)


Many of the paintings are done with a very surrealist composition with fantasy futuristic overtones. One tends to be reminded of the lurid covers of books in that certain section of the municipal library where only the sci-fi geek, the day-of-the-triffids nerd and the lost dare wander.


I.E. Moon


Furry animals and shaggy haired humans populate some of the pictures, the tufted fleece of these figures echoes something like the accepted representation of a mammoth’s coat (how do the palaeontologists know what that looked like?), perhaps in Soto’s future world our fate has been to endure a reverse evolution to survive the perilous environment he has created. It is not clear in the “Self Portrait” is Soto beating his breast and accepting blame or pleading victim status. At first glance I thought he had painted himself enjoying a toke through his pre-neanderthal beard.


Riverside Self Portrait


Fantasy art, sci-fi books and comics are the last refuge of the irretrievably adolescent and I have never been able to get any further than Douglas Adams, so it comes as a shock to me to find that I love Jeff Soto’s work. “Inland Empires” was so good it prompted something that the last dozen shows since Kid Acne at Stella Dore have failed to do – it restored my enthusiasm for uploading a few pics and banging out a few words.


Turqoise Skull


Words can’t do justice to either the content of Soto’s painting or to the beauty of his craft so compensate for the inadequacies of the write up by checking a set of show pics here:

The Ti(des)zer...They Are A Changing? ?

A fairly prominent wall in Shoreditch, almost a whole building 'taken out'. . . HA and ID crews in attendance....




Buffed by the trigger happy council boys like everything else? Who knows!

But by christ if this is the shape of the future state of Shoreditch, I like it!

Kid Acne – Smoke And Mirrors

Stella Dore Gallery
Rivington St, London
2-25 April 2009

all photos: NoLionsInEngland

You can take the kid off the street but you shouldn’t take the street out of the Kid. Sheffield’s renaissance man Kid Acne covers the graffiti, gallery artist, music producer and DJ hipness angles and has staged his first London solo show in London at Stella Dore.
Kid Acne occasionally illuminates walls of London with colourful masked cat-girls, showing great effect from an economic cartoon style.

Towards the tail end of 2008 Kid Acne introduced a 1 foot tall army of Bouddica-like women pasted around the footings of many London walls and pillars, All the women had warrior like garb, occasional lavish fur stoles, a few injuries and each carried a sword. It was clear they were by Kid Acne but not exactly clear what these women were about.

Kid Acne’s first London solo show opened at Stella Dore gallery, so achingly hip it even has paps staking out the Eine-painted front door. Street Artists are under pressure these days to have a few more tricks up their Kangol sleeves than just a few stencils on canvas and, luckily, Kid Acne has mounted three light boxes just inside the door. Why lucky? Well as soon as the gallery doors admit the first few rubber-neckers a machine hic-ups quantities of dry ice Spinal Tap would be embarrassed by, the diffused glow from the light-boxes casts a lighthouse beam guiding Shoreditch’s cool and thirsty to the buckets of beer.

The lightboxes have a collection of black images which at first glance seem to reference some runic iconography or Eygyptian hieroglyphics. Close inspection reveals a more intriguing set of truths.

Melhor Que Nada (Better Than Nothing)


A semi-naked women in suspenders with a crop pony-rides another semi-naked women with a halter in her mouth. Architectural columns and details, garden tools, blindfolds, strange garb, strange handshakes, symbols of squares and triangles, detecting a pattern?

What are the women up to? Well apart from the aforementioned sexual shenanigans which hopefully you have ceased drooling over, there are women gathered around a table arms raised, arms linked, clearly joined together in some kind of secret society, a coven of women involved in a séance it seems, communicating with the dead and raising their sisters out of their graves. The strange garb, one trouser-leg rolled up, the strange symbols, a builder’s square and compass, illustrations of hands joined together, suddenly blatantly obvious Freemasonry references abound. Those columns, they’re the five orders of architecture, five different forms of pillar and pillars are central symbols in the freemason’s cult.

Diagrams


The checkered grid below the blindfold woman with the hangman’s noose round her neck, that’s the mosaic pavement said to be the floor of Solomon’s temple, alluding to cardinal virtues and the kind care of providence. (Ain’t google great). The Freemasonary link sends us back to re-assess the ritual content in the lightboxes, ritualism and secrecy are key features of a Freemason’s gathering and the twisted construct Kid Acne creates here is that the rituals are being conducted by women. A Freemason’s lodge is generally a male enclave, so perhaps the women are taking the men on at their own game.


Diagrams

One or two of the details are actually more appropriate to an Ann Summer’s catalogue than the Freemason’s guide to symbolism. These toys may bring a smile to a maiden’s visage and present a message to the male of the species warning that he can be replaced.

Diagrams - Detail

The revelation of the un-expected themes fires our curiosity, feeling our way around the edges of the gallery through the clinging fog, now imbued with a much more sinister overtones, fingers tip-tap and fumble across a set of eight wooden etched Ouija boards. One or two of the boards feature Kid Acne trademark Warrior Women and the set sustains the theme of ritualism developed in the lightboxes.

Ouija boards

Ouija board of course have critics from across all religious and scientific communities concerned about occultish communication with demons and there are calls for warnings of the strong likelihood that your best mates may be revealed to be complete shits out to spook you by pushing the glass around.

Ouija Board


The set piece displays are two groups of 15 Stabby Women, single female figures, often topless, all looking alert and outwards, nothing introspective or self absorbed about these women, all bar one have swords, a few wear disguises, all have at least one aspect in which the erotic element of an empowered woman is brought to the fore. No there is no more powerful stimulant of the male mind than an erotic image with a story attached, imagery and stories go together in the world of soft porn. So the priest said.


Stabby Women

The Stabby Women clearly have a mission, possibly they are engaged in a quest or a hunt, or are on the defensive but the images lack a narrative that really tells us what they’re actually up to. The intelligence gained from the mixed images on the lightboxes may suggest their enemy is the male of the species, but faced with a Stabby Women on her own, probably when she’s at her most dangerous, there is only guess-work and you know how deficient in the intuition department men are.

Stabby Woman


The show print is a two colour edition of 25 screenprint in a choice of green or copper colours.


Smoke And Mirrors - Detail


Our bare-topped bandana’d Stabby Woman heroines get their moment in the sunlight in a pair of 4 colour screen prints produced by Choque Cultural of San Paulo, possibly explaining the Portuguese titles.


Melhor De Nada


A freestanding cutout masked girl, semi crouched on the floor emphasises the close links of Kid Acne’s style to pop art, in fact it is very hard to see the simple stark characterisation of the female’s distinguishing characteristics without Julian Opie springing to mind.

So there we have Kid Acne’s art. Very easy on the eye, the pop art stylisms are pleasing to behold, but underlying the images are themes of cultism, deception, secret societies, female ascendancy, ritualism and the occult. If only the story of the Stabby Women wasn’t so frustratingly incomplete.

See more Smoke And Mirrors pics here.

dr. d “HMP Brainwash Launderette”

222 bethnal Green Rd
London
5 March, continuing.

all photos: NoLionsInEngland

dr. d is one of London’s more mysterious street art institutions, their (the mystery extends to doubt as to whether dr. d is singular, plural, boy or girl) manipulation and subversion of street billboards flickers at the edge of public conscious, playing games via a medium most of us have learnt to filter off our radar screens.

dr. d rails against Big Brother state intrusion, the supremacy of commerce’s self interests and suppression of basic human rights in totalitarian states. They probably haggle upwards over the price of their fair trade pint of milk as well. Scale is not an issue with Dr. d, simply the bigger the better. The most recent example being this response to Welsh “Best newcomer 2008” Duffy’s rapid escalation to coca cola bunny.

dr. d - Amy spreads those Duffy Rumours


dr. d has maintained long running poster campaigns proclaiming London’s proud boast as the world’s largest open prison and declaring Hackney and various other London parishes as The Sterile State.

The Sterile State Of Hackney

Last year’s Olympic games provided a focus for protest against suppression and exploitation within China and even its occupation of Tibet, dr.d pasted a blood slashed “Made In China” poster all city.

Brainwashed

An open and normally functioning launderette has been take over as the home base for a dr. d installation of anti propaganda propaganda, the attendant crowd being a mix of rough trendies and rough clothes washers.


Wash Thy Clothes, Wash Thy Mind

The walls of the launderette are pasted over with a montage of images of a 1950s stereotypical, almost mythological, homely goodness intertwined with the kind of proclamations a big brother society might make to anaesthetize a powerless population against the state’s power building activities.


dr. d - Is It Ok If We Watch

The government sanctioned erosion of the individual’s right to privacy and the conflict between freedom and total monitoring of private individual’s lives and movements is mocked through the strings of official platitudes.




London is touted as being the most CCTV rich city in the World and dr. d peppers the launderette with cameras which twist and crane to capture all our private moments, whilst providing us with official H.M.P (Her Majesty’s Prison) warnings whose subtext would read “you’ve been warned AND there is sod all you can do about it”. The kind of thing which implies a choice where none really exists, “eyeball scan Sir?”.

Biometric Scan In Progress

The presence of dark, shadowy spooks lampoons the invasion of our privacy by the state, though if dr. d was present at the opening he/she/they were notably camera shy.


Zero Spin

Even in a world where old municipal baths and school halls are being pressed into service as novelty galleries, the concept of staging an art protest show in a launderette is radical. Fears that the Brainwash edifice might amount to nothing more substantial than an insignificant subversion of a small corner of a laundromat are laid to rest by the comprehensive makeover given to the utilitarian urban space.

dr. d’s protest is that all your communications are monitored, all your movements observed and even the secrets of your DNA and the intimate patterns within your eyeball are now not only no longer private but they are actively used by the authorities to control your movements and your access to freedoms that previous generations fought to preserve. Brainwashing is a bit of a stretch, dr. d’s punk pro-individuality sentiment strikes a blow for an anti authoritarianism which is highly relevant in a world where fabricated excuses are used to justify excessive state control of the basic freedoms of London’s population.


More pictures of a launderette and other dr.d infrastructure here

More re-arranged billboards and commercial lies pricked on dr. d's website. Check the Billboards link, my kids laughed themselves sick at "I broke wind, will the poo fall out". I consider their education complete.

CEPT - Galaxy Rays Show

The Long Arm Gallery
Bridewell St, Bristol,
20 Feb - 13 March 2009

all photos: Howaboutno and NoLionsInEngland



It seems like moments ago that Cept and Mike Ballard got up with a joint show in a Dalston, London workshed yet here we are 4 months later and half a world away in former police station in Bristol for Cept’s new solo show.


You’re nicked! – photo NoLionsInEngland

As in the London show, CEPT hangs gorgeous canvasses on the walls and indulges himself and us with a variety of mixed media installations. A vertical stack of TV screens inside a cage-door lift greets visitors timidly crossing the ex-cop shop threshold, flickering black and white film loops backed with crackling American voices issue barked ultimatums and set a jagged and staccato tone for the show.

photo: Howaboutno


Those familiar with previous Christmas group shows at the Bridewell St police station will need to know that the cells downstairs are not in use, though the rooms that are open retain a strong institutional spartanism. The main gallery room is shared between a collection of canvasses and a swirling wall painting. The wall painting echoes the style of the Dalston illusion room but is a minor fanfare for the half height cubby hole entrance to the installation room beyond.

photo: Howaboutno

Neither the sharp lines of the wall painting nor the strong colours of the canvasses in the main space can explain the dissonant industrial hum that fills the space, it permeates through from the direction of the next room but the half height door ensures that there is no preview of what lies inside, so the process of entering the room maximises the impact.

"Laplace Transforms" - photo: Howaboutno

Dalston’s illusion room was an empty and irregular shaped chamber twisted and distorted by Cept’s perspective juggling wall, ceiling and floor painting. This time, the space is filled by “Laplace Transforms” a bizarre sonic sculpture. Inside a glass fronted pyramid is a record player playing a piece of 7 inch vinyl literally to death – the needle has been replaced by a scalpel blade and a microphone picks up the scrapping of the record’s grooves, the signal passes through a voice changer and the amplified drone feeds back through the mic. In a cheeky nod to the artists’ graff origins the scene is illuminated by a spraycan lamp. It might assist interpretation to understand that Laplace transforms are mathematical operators that make differential equations even easier, used in among other things sound wave mechanics. Perhaps not.

"Laplace Transforms" detail – photo: Howaboutno

The pyramid shape of the sculpture references the All-Seeing Eye. Galaxy Rays from the painting above the record player erupt out of the all-seeing eye, cross the floor of the room in all directions, and talk across the room to a painted Transformer Sun King, the clever link being Ra as all seeing eye linked to a Sun King, Sun-Ra being one of the artist’s fav jazz musicians.

Sun King + Laplace Transforms– photo NoLionsInEngland

Whilst the eye takes in all the details and the mind spins, the ears start to pick up all kinds of slowly meandering harmonics in the audio. The gloom, the strong lines across the room and the textured relief in the floor all combine to knock senses off balance and make eyeballs pulsate, these effects are essential to the full immersive experience though you should bail before the diggery-doo aural illusion kicks in.

The main gallery contains a modest seven canvasses. The paintings are tense and dramatic and, with one notable exception, finishes are clean and glossy. The All Seeing Eye and Galaxy Ray motifs appear significant in several canvasses.

“Omega Supreme”, photo: Howaboutno

The Cept Super Villain’s spiral of despair continues, his face appears bleak and bitter, until he disappears in a series of body ripping explosions.

"The Cult Of The Explosion", photo: Howaboutno

The exception mentioned is this gorgeously grimy Super Villain portrait.

“Kyoto Crush” – photo NoLionsInEngland

A hunt through the adjacent admin office reveals a small number of painted album covers and a stack of prints and the installation room has a number of exercises in geometric patterns, and errrrr drips.

A flick through the pile of prints reveals a remarkable degree of individual variation thanks to the swirls of colour and bits of text added by the artist before the screenprint was applied, they look so varied as to be almost a numbered series of uniques.

“The Cult Of The Explosion” print. – photo NoLionsInEngland


A personal favourite among the paintings in the Surface Noise room is Transit Minds, the pyramid picks up on the show’s theme of the Galaxy Rays source whilst drips which defy logic to run both up and down make the red strip resemble a fat, pulsing noise readout on an oscilloscope display.

“Transit Minds” – photo NoLionsInEngland

We are getting accustomed to Cept’s shows having a coherence as a whole and an un-deniable beauty too, successfully differentiating him from most of the paint-drip-hang-sell urban artists. The bulk of the work connected with the show has been done after a short breather following the October show, Cept is un-doubtedly surfing a burst of creative power at the moment, let’s look forward to that energy being channelled back to the streets sometime soon.


Howaboutno’s photos are an institution. He should be in one. See more of his Cept Galaxy Ray photos here.

NoLionsInEngland's point and click pics from the show are here.