Just got some great photos of Sickboy’s upcoming Stay Free show. I posted about the show yesterday. It opens December 3rd, and one visitor will win an installation piece from the show worth £20,000.
In my first post on the Stay Free show, I said I was curious to see how well Sickboy’s work would carry over from rubbish skips and old buildings to gallery walls and living rooms. I think these photos provide some strong evidence that Sickboy is not going to have any problems transitioning into gallery work.
Photography by www.andrepenteado.comPhotography by www.andrepenteado.com
When art fans in New York are looking for cutting edge art, they need look no further than Ad Hoc Art in Brooklyn. Ad Hoc Art shows some of the best new street art and “low brow” art for not too much money. Their upcoming show, The Brooklyn Block Party, has work from 11 lino-block cutting artists including Swoon, Imminent Disaster, Elbowtoe, Judith Supine, and Gaia, and their new project room has upcoming shows from some of my favorite artists, C215 and Know Hope.
Ad Hoc Art is also the home of Peripheral Media Projects, probably two the most anti-authoritarian street artists working today.
Andrew Michael Ford is the director at Ad Hoc Art, and he’s been kind enough to answer a few questions about the gallery. Continue reading “Andrew From Ad Hoc”
UPDATE: I had an error in this article. Pure Evil tells me that Lister bought a comic or two featuring The Joker right before hearing of Ledger’s death. Not a tabloid magazine. The photo that Lister used for his painting was found at a different time.
Bunny Fingers by Pure Evil at Saints and Sinners. Photo by RJ
Here’s the second of my artist profiles based on the Saints and Sinners show at the St. Martin’s Lane Hotel.
Walking around Shoreditch and Hackney, Pure Evil’s work is almost impossible to ignore. He is undoubtedly one of London’s most prolific street artists, both in how much of his work is on the streets, and how varied the work can be.
PE’s work stems from a fear that something is just going wrong is the world. “I just kinda have this sense of a shit-storm coming, you know, all the time,” he said. In part due to this sense of impending doom, he spends much time researching its potential causes: from the power of multi-national corporations to Milton Friedman’s economic theories and groups like the Illuminati. When his reactions to his research emerge in his work, PE says they often get mixed up and come out as a sort of hodgepodge of fears.
Much of PE’s work parodies or plays on pop culture gone wrong. “I’m trying to summon the dark side of popular culture,” he said.
The PE persona comes from some of his early childhood experiences. When he was young, he would spend time with his cousins in the countryside. PE’s cousins had a lot of guns, and he used to walk around the countryside with guns strapped to his body. One day, his cousins gave him a shotgun and let him go out hunting for small game. While he was out, he “saw some rabbits and shot them,” said PE. “I didn’t think anything of it and then walked over and there was actually a rabbit that had been shot, and it’s that kind of thing where you go ‘what does that actually gain?’” Killing the rabbit made PE realize that death is real and that it can come so easily from something as simple as a gun. “[The Pure Evil tag is] the idea that this rabbit that I killed is now sort of undead and coming back to haunt me.” Continue reading “What Is Pure Evil?”
This is a pretty cool form of “alternative graffiti.” It’s not quite reverse graffiti (unless you want to take down cities completely), it’s not quite something that GRL will do, it’s natural graffiti. Moss graffiti is something that it apparently very easy to make with little more than some moss and a can of beer, and it looks awesome. Becki Fuller has a photo of the stuff in New York, and Stories from Space has instructions on making your own.
Well, the inevitable pricing shakedown seems to have begun. Before the second wave of street art can start, there needs to be a time when prices drop a bit. Right now, nobody knows what anything is worth, so nobody is willing to buy all but the very best work. Just like products in the financial markets right now, there is plenty of good street art out there, but nobody wants to risk buying anything but a masterpiece.
In the past two weeks, I’ve come across three instances of galleries dropping prices on large portions of their inventory (Campbarbossa and Herakut must be feeling pretty pleased with themselves right about now, having already sold everything for Dirty Laundry). Maybe these galleries really do feel like giving us all a 10-35% discount just for the heck of it, but I’m guessing that’s not the case. I think this downturn is just a temporary blip though. True collectors who know what they want (as well as savvy investors with cash to spare) could get some great deals right now. Continue reading “So It’s Come To This…”
Last week I wrote about 9 prints that I had found for under £90. This isn’t going to be a regular series of posts, but I’ve found a couple of new prints under £90 that I thought I should share.
I lived in St. John’s Wood for a while, where they have a sculpture of George and the Dragon, so maybe that’s why I’ve always loved this print. I just think it’s a great image.
If you’ve always wanted your own Adam Neate, but couldn’t come up with £40,000, you’re in luck. The Independent has a huge writeup on him today, and according to them, this coming Friday, Neate will be putting 1000 pieces on the street. I’ll be out of town, which is killing me, but for those lucky collectors in London this weekend, a quick reaction time is all that will be needed to snatch up a fantastic work of art.
Perhaps “Street Art Action,” as the endeavor is being called, is a bit of a publicity stunt compared to Neate’s previous random sprees of dropping art wherever he wanted, but who cares? By giving out 1000 pieces in one day, Neate will not only decrease the resale value of all the street pieces being sold at auction, he’s making sure that all his fans know when to go looking for their own cardboard treasure. I just hope that nobody goes around following his assistants and taking every piece for himself.
SAM3 has a been spending some time in Shoreditch. He’s put two great pieces at the entrance to Cargo, across from Eine’s “SCARY” wall. Unusualimage has the photos.
For those who haven’t heard already, Faile has a show opening this week in London called Lost In Glimmering Shadows. I’ll be at the preview tomorrow night, and if all goes well, I’ll be twittering the show, possibly including some photos, on Vandalog’s twitter.
From what I’ve seen so far, this promises to be one of the year’s top shows, with lots of new imagery. Some of those new images are currently pasted on the street of Shoreditch, so be sure to have a look.
This is my first time using twitter, so we’ll see how it goes. For those who aren’t geeky like I am, twitter is a “microblogging” platform that is designed for posts up to 140 characters in length. It is great for something like the opening of a show, because you can read my mini updates as they happen, and I can send updates easily from my phone.
So check the twitter feed tomorrow evening for live coverage of the opening of Lost in Glimmering Shadows.
I’ve been bargain hunting. With the economy in the toilet, those £1800 Faile prints are probably out of most people’s budgets. I’ve found 9 great prints that are available for £90 or less.
M-City have just recently released this amazing print. Anybody who has seen their work at Cans or elsewhere knows how great it is. I think this print is a chance to get something really special.
