Hit Shot Walls - November 2013

Words: NoLionsInEngland
Photos: HowAboutNo and NoLionsInEngland as stated


You didn't seriously think that cold weather would put Shoreditch Street Art into hibernation did you? Fresh colour and frantic activity sustain the rotating uncurated hang of energetic street art for which this area is reknown and we count ourselves lucky to have been able to capture some of it with our various cameras.


A.CE has been out placing paste up collages images left, right and centre and we can't pass up this opportunity to point out that Shoreditch Street Art Tours has a competition this month to win art by A.CE.

photo: HowAboutNo


Making a mark on Shoreditch surfaces for the first time was Borondo who is something of a star on the Spanish street art scene. Mark making is the appropriate term for Borondo’s craft which involves scratching paint off windows with a thick toothed comb. This was his first time painting UK walls but he hopes to return in the New Year.

photo: HowAboutNo



Guess which graffiti cubist had a new show opening in London during the month! Yup - Hunto, seen here collaborating on a mural with Millo who.... has a show coming up this month, who'd have thought?

photo: HowAboutNo


Parlee - Essex Rockers, daubed a Global Street Art mural hoarding which panel by panel is getting smaller with each passing day it seems as the building being built behind the hoarding approaches completion. Grimsby St will be a considerable duller place with those hoardings gone and it will be interesting to see if the current tolerance of the un-curated street art on the opposite wall survives whatever new businesses and residents move into that new building.

photo: HowAboutNo

Captain Kris enjoying a brief moment up on the same hoardings but round the corner on Brick Lane, this wall caused lots of amusement with the daily dismantling and rebuilding of the hoarding as the workers enjoyed a game of surreal jigsaw puzzle solving with the art on the panels.

photo: HowAboutNo


Stripy tights and stilettos usually means just one artist – INSA, however, we're not sure this poor unfortunate fashion victim seemingly stuck with a bit of Ben Wilson art work on their platform stilettos is by INSA.  TBC.

photo: HowAboutNo


It has been satisfying to see a couple of mural walls getting quite wildly dogged in the past month and CERN has taken this opportunity to pen a note-to-self alongside a nice fat dub.

photo: HowAboutNo

This month sees the long serving NoLions SLR being dry docked for urgent and hideously expensive repairs and we are taking advantage of the someone elses marketing budget to road test a Nokia Lumia 1020 smartphone, the phone Lady Nolions describes as way smarter than me. It certainly does justice to this luscious and huge Dan Kitchener tube layup mural.


photo: NoLionsInEngland


STRA cuts a pretty mean stencil and was quick to respond to the rantings of comic motor-mouth Russell Brand on Newsnight last month


photo: NoLionsInEngland


Ben Naz had a very busy month slapping single layer stencil street art all over Shoreditch, including this reverse stencil of young punked up Madge doing a Miley Cyrus tongue job.


photo: NoLionsInEngland


This year Mr Fan HC has painted some awesomeJeff Koons style inflatable animals and it's great to see him get up first with the yuletide references in this reindeer and santa scorching through the night skies piece. Fan has made a very interesting decision to retain Odeith's fox from the previous painting though quite what it does in the compostion beats me.


photo: NoLionsInEngland


Lily Mixe has established her trademark with intricately cut paper sea life paste ups and in case the size of these isn’t apparent from the surrounding stickers and tags, that piece is about 3 foot high and 5 foot wide which represents a mammoth Swoon-esque amount of paper cutting.


photo: NoLionsInEngland

Giles Walker & Candice Tripp: "I'm Never Shopping Here Again"

30th November - 12th December

Black Rat Projects/Gallery 223
137 - 139 Lower Marsh Street
London

All photos: NoLionsInEngland


Shopping is an evil which I put off until the need is way past the point others might have deemed a shop a necessity, as those who have checked my utilitarian taste in garms can testify.   A trip to a department store populated by Giles Walker and Candice Tripp’s morbid paintings and animatronicsconvinces me at least two other people also see the evil inherent in shopping.




Inside this department store we reel and recoil from Candice Tripp’s sinister enfant terrible paintings and Giles Walker’s beastly and at times fetishistic mantronics. The staging of this show will remind many of the Lazardes/Old Vic Leake St tunnel shows though this hardly surprising as we are in essentially the same Victorian engineering structure around the Waterloo train tracks.






In small nooks, many times higher than wide, suspended shop mannequins gave occasional shrugging-off-mortal-coil spasms, I was reminded of a slightly macabre Sam Taylor-Wood, which is a very good thing.






Many there covered their eyes at the gothic horror of the children, terrorising eachother and abusing passersby with twisted senseless barbarities. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.




Candice Tripp


In a room of child’s possessions, a trio of hemp sacks are suspended from the ceiling and inside the live contents squirm and thrust out against their imprisonment…they look like puppies about to be taken to the river but our suspicion is that the contents are not canine. We sense that we are in a department store where man’s suppressed depraved inclinations have been freed of the normal contraints and decorums. Or Poundland.




(to avoid disappolintment - this one is not animated)

This is possibly the darkest show I have seen this year and Walker and Tripp are incredibly well matched in their ability to discomfort us. Gloom, depravity, sleaze and sinister threats are the standard BOGOFS in the Walker Tripp store.   I received an email today with the subject line “Happy Shopping Day”…there are no happy shopping days, “I’m Not Shopping Here Again” is as good as it gets.

Mike Ballard: Advertising The Invisible

22 Nov – 29 Dec 2103

The Residence Gallery
229 Victoria Park Rd, London E9 7HD

Words, photos: nolionsinengland




Experiencing a Mike Ballard show tends to induce a profound revelatory consciousness and his latest offering “Advertising The Invisible” prompts the thought what a crackingly versatile word “warp” is. Obviously there is the connotation of intergalactic travel at a unit of speed probably faster than light. Then we have the twisting tone-stretching acoustic meaning where harmonics, sounds and pitches are all crushed together then allowed to expand into a vacuum exclusively occupied by percussive beats. A ship can be constrained, prevented from taking off can be tethered by a warp. Finally, there is the sense in which warped describes a fractured style of thinking, a deviant state of mind. All these possible senses collide, clash and rub eachother up in a Mike Ballard show, he is truly warped. Jesus weft.





Media is another multi dextrous word one could twist and apply in a multi faceted way to the content of Mike Ballard’s show. Media rolled out include photographic collages, hacked objects converted to …… well, receiver/generator/transmitter devices, musical productions, chromatographic representations of digital signals. It sounds like I am making this up so perhaps some of those media can be illustrated using the time honoured tradition of photography and in the tradition of several other blogs we know and love this time, it’s pure single handed wobble-cam shooting.




A large cast assisted in the production of various musical and visual experiments, all part of the soundtrack for a completely fictitious and obviously unmade film but in this PR saturated era of spoilers, teasers and studio twitter leaks, it seems a logical step to release the soundtrack before the film has even been conceived. The Aerosol Orchestra played loud, ambient and percussive, leading a line up including The Clapton Rifles and The Long Range Desert Group, remarkably, all of them composed and conducted by Mike Ballard. Ensemble members name checked on the band bio include stationary related fictitious luminaries such as Rack Staedler, Phil Edding, Uni Wide, Zig 50, Shu White and possibly Pete Pental. Graffiti taggers will recognise a theme.




Ballard provides us with a broad range of visual treats ranging from his black and white photo montages inspired by Carravagio, Metropolis and brutalism to the optical elements of previous hacked audio visual experiments with record decks, cameras and light boxes via abstract cosmic geometry.




Despite the absence of direct cross over to Ballard’s notorious graffiti persona, this show still manages to illustrate what a hugely diverse and accomplished talent he is. We avoided clichés such as “internationally renown” at the start of the article and I’ll be buggered if they are going to be allowed to creep in here at the end but for sure after setting foot in LA, Europe and shortly, San Paolo, it’s nice to see catch a Ballard show on his East London doorstep.