New Ron English/NoLionsInEngland Collab Revealed

all photos: NoLionsInEngland

I have always been repelled by Ron English’s udder-rich pop coloured studio work, few exceptions barely worth mentioning. Moving that studio art out onto the streets doesn’t change my mind – see Camo boy from 2008. Even his inclusion in CANS with what looked like paste ups seemed a bit odd.


Ron English Camo Boy, London, (this was spot jockeying, not a collab!)


The billboard campaign stabs corporate and western imperialism nicely where it hurts, in the blind eye it turns on its own hypocrisy


NABKA60 - 60 Years of Palestinian Occupation
Ron English, SHepherds Bush, London 2008


This week I have collected a large series of sightings of speech bubbles and thought bubbles containing wistful bon mots, semi lucid sound bites and snippits of a private inner monologue best not brought out into the open. A bit of flickr research confirms Vandalog to be the first to attribute these to Ron English and for artists of such stature, RJ’s attribution is a good as law, in fact if it wasn’t Ron English I suggest he knock a few of these out sharpish.




At first glance these captions were puzzling and seemingly un-satisfying. What was their point, and why was their placement so damn careless. Not one of them seemed to relate in any meaningful way to its environment. London’s walls are heaving with graffiti characters, rich singers masquerading as teen sluts on illegal flyers or marketer’s perfect families on advertising hoardings, these captions could surely have been better placed so that they looked like they were coming from those flat characters?




Perhaps you might think the walls as well as having ears also have thoughts, complexes and wise words to share.




We know this artist grafts ruminants' udders onto Disney characters but what are these ruminations about? Then the penny drops. What English has put up is a series of incomplete installations, the pieces only make sense when YOU come along to actually say or think them. That placement - he was wilfully avoiding those characters on the wall. Every single one of these pieces works brilliantly when a member of the public passes by and momentarily the captions belong to them.


(In one block I will be run down by a bus....if I walk in the gutter)

Even more intriguingly, the person who fleetingly becomes part of the installation is probably not aware of the significance of his role. The art exists only for a tantalising moment and really is best appreciated from the third party perspective.




You can only conclude that this art needs you there to complete it and in the case of the various art pieces illustrating this web page, the art existed only when I the photographer was present to observe and record its transient existence. I am honoured to be able to share with you this street work that Ron and I put together.


(clothes and gait - model's own)


I would like to thank Ron English for his vital contribution to our collaboration, I really couldn’t have done it without him. Thank you also to his assistants, drivers, ladder bearers, make-up artists and anyone else who knows him.




If you think this insight is rubbish (congratulations) I believe Ron English makes his intention quite clear with this particular caption for those of a more Liliputian stature.




This Ron English campaign is the conceptual opposite of my single all time favourite street art installation – Jimmy Cauty’s street mirror under Old Street Bridge which makes the observer disappear. Here English requires you to appear. You can’t knock the genius of a guy who can come up level but opposed to Cauty’s finest (street) hour, this is why Ron English actually is deservedly the legend he is.


Jimmy Cauty, London, 2008

That said, in a period where an artist is taking art placed in the bottom 5 inches of London walls to new heights (no – really, boom boom), Ron manages to sully that hem of public space with a small paste up of an excessively pneumatic Mini Mouse. Oh dear.



Additional photos here

Day Off Urbexing

So, I had a rare free day planned a week in advance to go to a few abandoned sites around East Sussex - namely a closed technical college on the sea front. . .







And then on to a long closed private school in the countryside





Now whilst on these trips I do expect to see the odd bit of graffiti, I certainly wasn't expecting to find my first two full on Paul Insect pieces!

This stencil firstly:



And then this "life sized" Mickey Mouse:



Originally questioned by a few Flickr contacts, to which I said "nah he wouldn't come out here to paint that surely"? Then contacted and had it confirmed by the gallery.

So much for a day off. But I really wasn't complaining!

Street Artist Servants Express Gratitude For Long Weekend

all photos: NoLionsInEngland


To echo The Socialist Worker’s famous “traffic delays in London” commentary on the wedding of Charles and Di, large amounts of Britain came to a standstill today as workers enjoyed an extra day off work and a 4 day weekend. Kate Middleton, slim, looker, married Prince William, privileged, inherited. Street artists, resplendent in traditional livery of flat sole sneakers, shin length skinny denims and Abercombie hoodies paid tribute to the occasion.

Perhaps the most prolific around the ancient borough of Shoreditch, haunt of their majesties’ crustier artists and other trendie subjects, was Dotmasters, in his customary supporting role as Bearer Of The Exacto Knife, delivering a prolific number of this single layer stencilled artistic tribute of the royal likeness presented in the form of police identikit photos.


Dotmasters


Mr.Farenheit, Master of the Paste, has installed at strategic locations (i.e. the usual spots) a selection of newsprint pages stencilled over with a variety of messages expressing a commoner’s love the future Queen.


Mr.Farenheit


A parallel between a Prince’s desire to be left alone (particularly when falling out of the VIP area area of a Chelsea nightclub with a dozen close freeloading rugger mates) and a reluctant sexual partner adorns several locations of the realm.


Mr.Farenheit


The street art community has paid its respect to the ancient traditions of this Sceptr'd isle, led symbolically by its great royal figureheads, successors to a long line of distinguished and brilliant cross-dressers, into a brave new era of tourist economy dependence, determined to show the world whose eyes today watch our green and peasant land with envy and awe how Britain maintains its love of honouring those born to be first to the trough.




K-Guy produced a limited edition screen print but didn’t make it out onto the streets. This sort of summarises the general level of ennui reigning among a populace upon whom the greatest impact will have been “yippee, another 4 day weekend”. All in all a pretty paltry reaction to the wedding. Apart from the obvious targets - privilege, wealth and un-earned but mainly symbolic authority, it seems Willy and Kate present little material to inspire the artist courtier. Perhaps the scintillating wit and pointed political satire is being reserved for the eventual wedding of his swastika wielding brother.

Late update, I forgot about this one,as likely to be a paid for commission as not, cheque signed "love Liz and Phil"?




After The Piss Up.....The Paste Ups

K-Guy obviously felt the sludge landslide of instant commemorative pull-out souvenir colour supplements leant an excessive gloss to an overblown celebration of the marriage of the nation's favourite negligee manikin to the single beaming 2:1 chink of intelligence flying in the face of the royal family's fine tradition of academic mediocrity, so he silk screened this mass paste up souvenir bollocks with the exortation "God Save Your Mad parade" from the Sex Pistols 1977 Jubilee year single "God Save The Queen".


K-Guy



K-Guy


Just yards away HowAboutNo, still reeling from an excess of Amsterdam refreshments, spotted a couple of figuroids bigging up William as a kind of "Mens Health" speedo poser and Kate with a splat of blood on her wedding dress designed by someone dead. Somehow we doubt that was the first time the Prince stormed her palace gates, c'mon, the Royals move with the times daddyo.


Unknown

Sweet Toof And Paul Insect, London, 2011

Lots of fun recently quietly observing a furtive pair of artists working silently and swiftly on one of London’s less accessible rooftops.


Sweet Toof and Paul Insect, London Rooftop, 2011 from NoLionsInEngland on Vimeo.



It took 4 nights and about 50 litres of paint for Sweet Toof and Paul Insect to blend signature imagery in this visible-from-space collaborative masterpiece. In essence, the painting is a double headed face munching away at the rooftop hut. Best viewed from 1,000 feet, the symmetry ensures the effect is the same whether viewed from the east over the Olympic Stadium or the west.

From the photography point of view this mission had a few tricky aspects. Obviously you can’t go throwing huge illuminative arcs of light around so you work with the natural light. The first night, after about 20 minutes the low cloud base boiled away and the urban-orange sky turned black plunging the rooftop into darkness. At the end of the clip you can see the opposite happen. Exposure times varied dramatically between 10 and 30 seconds.

There are two gas boiler outlets on the upper level, the output from those condenser boilers is bloody wet. Using a patented knotted rope to get up there to set up a camera position, the wind would veer and back unpredictably giving the camera a misty drenching.

I flew BA over the Olympic Stadium the other day but couldn’t find any landmarks other than the Olympic Stadium, there should be a prize for the first photo from a scheduled airliner!

UPDATE:
At last, Aug 2012, an aerial shot


BACKDATE
Dark Horse, Sweet Toof's first New York solo show opens at Factory Fresh on 29th of April 2011

Paul Insect has just collaborated with Sickboy on an installation at the onethirty3 space in Newcastle

Artists: Sweet Toof, Paul Insect

Photography, video: NoLionsInEngland

Music: Booze - Insanity Drive

Mike Ballard -The Ultra Nomadic Def Smith Cycle

Edel Assanti Project Space
276 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 1BB

Thursday 24th March - Saturday 30th April 2011

All photos NoLionsInEngland except HowAboutNo where stated.
Video by Mark Gostick via GalaxyRays


Hanging a few canvasses and calling it a show isn’t Mike Ballard’s style. Ballard deals in whole room illusion experiences, multi-media sonic and video assaults, challenging conceptual celebrations of “taking without consent” and the intersection where delusional un-hinged jazz weirdoes meet dazzle painting. The whole lot flows through the fizzing circuits of Ballard’s brain and discharges via electrical components melded together by the mad boffin’s own hands.




The Ultra Nomadic experience starts with a curious framed circular patterned paper, various Ballard themes can be recognised in the concentric circle patterns but the most interesting orbit is the very out edge which has two semi circles of patterns of images, each image remarkably similar to its neighbour but different by some incremental detail like one of those flicker book animations, and the significance of this is revealed as later as you dive into the subterranean space.




First stop in the basement is a garden shed, a hut – no hiding that’s what it is. Inside set in the middle of the floor is a low level kinetic lightbox. The glossy black box is punctured by a circular screen, a beam sweeps out repeating circles picking out a viscous, boiling universal. Is it detecting the beginning or the end, or a continuous repeating loop between the two? Who knows, some say it marked out an organic intra-cellular voyage path picked out by a navigation system travelling within a mutilated, knifed body. You choose, it’s in the eye of the beholder this one.


The light arc shows the sweep of the light line in the photoexposure time


The Ultra Nomadic Def Smith Cycle is a bigger, better cosmic traveller, a maker of tangibles and intangibles (Smith as in smithy, forge) and What The River Brings, a poker phrase and also the oldest piece in the show dating back to about Ballard’s All Of Everything era, represents that voyage, the transformer nomad complete with suitcase sets off propelled by energy from the larger older version of himself.




There are two other minor photographic collage pieces hidden away in an almost un-noticed recess at the rear of the basement, Ballard’s view on these springs from his obsession with music. The images pay tribute through the representation of a mystical figure transformed with visible bizarre inner energies and wizardly properties, the whole referencing the originators of hip hop DJ Kool Herc and Grand Wizard Theodore. Once again Mr Ballard is responsible for me wasting entire minutes googling musical references an indie honky knows nothing of.




All of which doesn’t so much as define a backdrop as get completely blown away by the main feature of the show. You can’t miss it, its ambience is apparent as the lo fi one note synth-meets-stuck-oscilloscope-drone permeates your head from the moment you commence your descent at the top of the stairs. The source is a new installation but one that very clearly shows its relationship to the LaPlace Transforms sculpture which Graffoto patiently explained after the 2009 Long Arm Gallery Galaxy Rays show.




In this incarnation, an edition of the circular paper Ultra Nomadic Def Cycle drawing we found at the top of the stairs rotates on a platter with two turntable pick-ups. One tone arm has a scalpel blade resting on the rotating disc, this both creates and picks up the vibrations though unlike the earlier Laplace Transforms, the blade doesn’t cut into and destroy the disk. The signal passes through a vocoder which results in the sonic eminences we hear. A second tone arm holds a small camera and a light.




Compare the Ultra Nomad Def Smith Cycle above with the LaPlace Transforms from the 2009 show:


Mike Ballard - LaPlace Transform, Bristol 2009, photo: HowAboutNo


The frame rate of the camera, the rotational speed of the disc (78RPM)and the separation of the images around the paper have been critically tuned so that each successive image captured by the camera is dead centre in the frame. The resulting live “time lapse animation” is projected onto a screen built into the housing, Ballard christens the whole thing a sonotrope merging the idea of an image generator and a self noise generator in one device.




The sculpture is topped off with various minute figures signifying a mystical origin or source. The device radiates warmth and a riich lushness, coning you into supposing that the innards must be full of valves and “Elvis at Sun Studio” microphones




So much for describing the appearance, the experience however is nothing without the sound. This whining acoustic screech won’t leave you alone, you can try ignoring it but your subconscious always picks out the tones, some crazy inate Fourier analyser within your nervous system locks onto the frequencies then shifts to pick out some higher harmonic, then a different tone. The effect is as if the instrument is somehow being “played” with a gentle, slow tensioning and relaxing of the “angry flies trapped in a balloon” knob.




Trance like rapture would be a suitable response. If the images generated by the same disc as the sound aren’t perception enhancing enough, then this is probably exactly the sound track for a fairly bad trip on psychedelic grade As. The ambience needed sylph like naked females to slowly whirl around, arms aloft in complete immersion in the mood but none of them could be persuaded. What you really want is to witness! Thankfully, Mark Gostick produced this really slick video which Graffoto has nicked without consent.


from GalaxyRays by Mark Gostick

Interestingly, the inner images, a silhouette figure saluting the sun and some geometric patterns are being illuminated at 50Hz (probably) and are rotating at 78rpm and as you can see in the vid that image moves forward very slowly, a bit like the wagon wheel stroboscopic illusion on film.

This show is about transformations and trance, repetitions and electricians. Compared to past shows it is more about immersion than illusion. If you are a tall slender hippy chick with your own stash of hallucinogenics, please get in touch for the Graffoto guided tour.

A few other photos here.

Skewville - Slow Your Roll

High Roller Society
Unit 10 Palmers Road,
London E2 0SY (Click for map)

19 March – 24 April 2011



photos: NoLionsInEngland

New York twin brother street art legends Skewville are bombing London for their first solo show at High Roller Society gallery. Fame on the streets worldwide has been secured thanks to their sneaker mission but Skewville are never shy of exploring ways to subvert the normal paste up- stencil-gallery show limitations of street art convention.


Trainers over telegraph wires have been around basically since trainers started wearing out, there’s nothing new in dangling sneakers from telephone wires but surrounded by a vast noise of stickers, stencils and paste-ups Skewville sought what they termed “next levelism” for street art techniques and so the trademark silk screened hand cut laced wooden sneakers mission kicked off. Wherever they go they take a few wooden sneakers and leave their “tag” by throwing pairs up over lampposts and telephone wires where they can hang more or less un-touchable. By their estimate they have done over 6,000 pairs in the past 11 years, Graffoto knows of 1 in London which has been there since 2004.


London, 2011


Skewville came to London in 2004 with a mission to do break the mould in putting up repeated simple images on the streets. London was in the grip of the stencil mafia and if stencils weren’t simple enough already, why not get up using a refinement of the old primary school potato print technique. Seeking an edge and discovering easy repeatability, Droo Skewville developed the sneaker stamp, in essence cutting a fresh pattern into the sole of old sneakers. The example below was buffed only last month and others still thrive nearby.




Skewville’s next refinement was to cut the image into a roller pad and hey presto, believe the Hype!




Less long-lived were some quirky sculptural grill signage from 2008.




The current trip has resulted in some more thrown dogs but don’t mark Skewville as street art one trick ponies, this year they have pulled off at least four shutters around the East End. On the streets of New York and wherever two bad ass jive talking yoots from the home counties meet, the greeting of choice is a YO! On opposite sides of an East London high street two shutters greet each other with a YO! before each working day commences, they then disappear and at the end of the shift they re-appear to salute each other.


YO! - YO backatcha!


On to the main reason for Skewvilles’s presence in London, the show at High Roller Society. It takes two to have a conversation and a duality is a recurring theme in this show. There are two parts to the show, one side of the room is older Skewville, the other is new stuff. Skewville has neatly bisected the room with the show’s Slow Your Roll mantra to mark this out as a show of two halves. The over-size stamp used to create the slogan down the middle forms part of a sculptural installation, the tyre rolling out Skewville’s message not to get too impressed with themselves.




In the more colourful half, we see some a Skewville staple, a collection of silkscreened collaged slogans and pop imagery which might have come from the classifieds in a Brooklyn butcher’s trade magazine.


Honey I shrunk The Kids/Brooklyn Flavor/Open Daily


An about turn to the opposite side of the room yields examples of the more recent Skewville direction. Stained, painted and etched images on wood is used to create these intriguing figurative paintings which hint at more meaningful significance.




One theme common to most of the work looks like an expression of regret at the inevitable compromises made on the passage to adulthood drawn from the perspective of the free spirited outsider looking on. It’s the blind stumble downwards from the pursuit of fame and fortune to having to take jobs to fund the dream to then finding life is passing by and yet another sucker has fallen into the trap. A shady spiv [N. Am: flim-flam merchant] employer in All In A Days Work lures the 9-5 work drone with a series of false hopes, fame, fortune, desire and hope ... and then the hidden truth...”Day Job Sucker”.


All In A Day's Work


You have to wonder whether the artist’s sentiments are first person regret or third person teasing. A further series of monochromatic compositions represents the working life as a fast vehicle now decrepit and propped up on bricks, graffiti painted on the vehicles’ side captures the dilemmas – 9-five, “fake a death”, “no return”, “Day Job Sucker”.


Love East Hate West/Fake A Death/Day Job Sucker


This theme of compromises continues through many of the more recent paintings and even some of the older coloured works, check out Vicious Cycle, Sucks Either Way, Side Deals, not to mention the deadly contemporary vices immortalised on various bottles and mousetraps including Envy, Desire, Lust, Desire, Fame, Fortune. Of course pursuing a gallery career doesn’t make the idealistic artist immune from those character traits either. Perhaps the paintings are signalling the start of a quest for liberation from the crushing work-eat-sleep drudge or an early warning to avoid this trap.

The figures in the paintings frequently incorporate a composite of architectural features, outdoor spaces, ambiguous signs and signals all pointing towards an individual’s bewilderment and sense of being overwhelmed by his urban surroundings. Alternatively a viewer could be excused for seeing a person who appears to dominate the environment, the fabric of the community appears to be internalised within the subject who appears to be bigger than the external world, perhaps Skewville really are the High Rollers of their universe, who knows?


Sucks Either Way (Detail)


Some of the symbols didn’t register for cultural reasons, for instance, the rectangles with a cross apparently are painted in playgrounds in NY to represent a pitcher’s target area for a game of “stick ball”, but then it’s quite likely someone from Brooklyn is going to wonder why three vertical lines and two horizontals at the top might get drawn on walls in the UK. This “intelligent pictogram” side of the show is full of interesting aspects and innuendoes derived from Skewville’s lives, home culture and influences but equally they can speak to the circumstances of most viewers, the symbolism is fine.

Between and within the various paintings are dotted lines and crosses creating divisions, links and groupings, Ad of Skewville gave us some cock and bull about them representing paths around their childhood clubhouse and X marking the spot where ye treasure may be found, the story was a good ‘un about notes they used to leave to remember where they’d hidden weapons they’d need to fend off bigger kids out to kick their arses . Another interpretation might be that Skewville could be using a draughtsman’s drawing convention to denote a section or another view through a drawing, as if begging the viewer to take a lateral view to discover the meaning within in the picture.





One thing noticeably absent from the show are sneakers, none. Whilst Skewville have put sneakers in shows in the past – their earlier shows were self promoted and curated – now their gut feel is to react against the exploitation by too many of the streets for commercial promotion by separating the street from the gallery, though Skewville will never resist a YO! or a BEEF, indoors or out.




At the top of this story we found lots of evidence of Skewville's longevity with street pieces surviving in London for the best part of more than half a decade which is no mean achievement in this place. Based on the interesting collection of work in this compact gallery space there is no sign that Skewville aren’t going to continue rolling for long time to come. The show raises fascinating questions about he possibility that the sentiments may be a personal exchange between the twin components of Skewville and you are compelled to appreciate that these concerns engage us all and the art reflects equally into our lives. Ok, it’s fun to contemplate the art in that way but at the end of the day the work has a fascinating and intelligent charm, we just like it !

For a selection of other images from Slow Your Roll and a few other Recent London streetpieces, click here.