SAINTY ‘BIRD HOUSE’ T-SHIRT
LIMITED EDITION T-SHIRT, 2 COLOUR PRINT HAND SCREENED BY THE ARTIST
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Last Weapon of Choice for a few months tonight, looks like a good one to go out on though, here’s the flyer…
…and the chat.
// <
This month we have one man army painting, the legendary comic book artist: ‘Lorenzo!’
HIP HOP & DUBSTEP:
Album launch party for
THE BIG BAND THEORY
Featuring:
KALI MIST, SOCIAL CONSCIENCE, DOMC, REGGIE MILLION$ & DJ KRAF-T.SUPERISK
B-LAM
RAT TASH
BLACKSMITH
DRILLZ & LEGO MAN
DJ BETAMAX
+ special guests throughout the night…
14th July. Mr Wolfs, Bristol. BS1 1JX
£3 ENTRY ALL NIGHT. Inc FREE shot before 12!
clothing giveawas from Sturban
weaponofchoicegallery.blogspot.com/
Still not got everything blogged from Glastonbury this year, few more bits to go, so here’s some. Where the Leftfield tent used to be, down by the meeting point, had been covered this year with a stage called the Queen’s Head, and a Sony sponsored computer games area, and chill out area, and stuff.
To pretty it all up, they commissioned a couple of mysterious Bristol connected artists to paint someone else’s design all over the front of the place, the legendary duo of Epson Von Stylus and Mr Belvedere.
‘The Snug’, apparently.
‘William’s Green’, think this is where the playstations n that were.
The Queen’s Head Bar…
…and some more next to the Queen’s Head Stage.
A good job in brightening up what was a ridiculously busy area, full of bright young things. Hopefully the Leftfield tent will be back next year…
Nice little spread from the guys at VNA. Issue 9:
www.verynearlyalmost.com
Related posts:
After the debacle of my recent holiday to Morocco I have to admit I’m just about fully recuperated. The skin seems intact and now I’m focusing on my biggest challenge yet to setting up my elusive silk screen print studio. I bought a bargain screen print dryer on Ebay (I know) for a phenomenally cheap £11.95. The postage knocked it up to over £100 – still I saved over a grand on anything similar out there. What gets me is I’m having real trouble removing the rust. The UK government (or was it Europe?) have decided to ban just about everything that can actually chemically remove rust, I suppose it’s for the common good – environmentally speaking that is – I just hope it wasn’t because some retard decided to drink it or feed it to their kids and pets. Who knows.
What I do know is I am slowly sinking into a rusty old stupor trying to restore my heap of orange junk I have sitting in the basement into a piece of vital equipment that resembles something like this:-
At first I was at it like a maniac, day and night sanding down springs and wires and supporting frames, but as the weeks have passed I’ve noticed almost everything I have tried to bring back to bare (what I assume is) stainless steel is still rather brown, but maybe I’m fighting a losing battle, perhaps it’s actually a Victorian antique made from cast iron? (Chris isn’t buying that guff) Whatever the hell it’s forged from I’ve tried every kind of drill and sanding attachment out there to restore a near, former glory desperate to prove to my GF I have saved over £1000 rather than wasted £100+.
Still I did manage to complete what I hope will be my last available digital print, I am already practising my spot colour transparency skills on Photoshop. They’re coming along nicely, and once I’ve de-rusted the dryer, bought a pressure washer, and all the consumables (plus a couple of cleaner screens) I am gunning to get on with my first limited edition silk screen print of Black Christ. In the meantime my ImageKind store will have a new edition in the next few days and I will make sure to write a feature on it at my homepage. It’s called ‘Outta Space’, it’s about the burgeoning global population (human that is) and I’ll explain my thinking further later on. For now here’s a sneak preview of what’s to come.
Oh well back to the garden, the complaining neighbours and my world of rust 
Tags: black christ, new art, outta space, print dryer, print rack, rust, rust cleaning, rusty metal, silk screen printing
Thanks to Kineta for sending these in, work in Dean Lane as it stood yesterday. Good to see it all going strong, even after the council sandblast one of the walls down there. Click for biggerness if you want.
Pen and Boswell
Epok
3Dom, below the big 3Dom…
…with someone else next to it, any ideas?
Here’s the sandblasted wall as it stands at the moment too. There are meant to be boards going up on the fence to replace the ability to paint on the wall, which was done to protect the building apparently. Yet to happen though.
There’s also a new group for Dean Lane graf on Flickr now if you’re on there, with an idea to be updated more regularly than the old one was. Looking good already.
(Thanks, Anne)
Evan Roth’s latest graffiti taxonomy project is now on display at Fondation Cartier’s Born In The Streets – Graffiti exhibition in Paris. It’s a study of the stylistic diversity found in Parisian graffiti tags. Evan photographed over 2,400 graffiti tags from April 24 to April 28, 2009 found in each of Paris’s 20 districts. Photographs were then archived, tagged and sorted by letter. The ten most commonly used letters by Paris graffiti writers were identified for further study (A,E,I,K,N,O,R,S,T and U). From each letter grouping, eighteen tags were isolated to represent the diversity and range of that specific character. Evan explains that the sets are not intended to display the “best” graffiti tags in Paris, but rather aim to highlight the diversity of forms ranging from upper case to lowercase, simple to complex and legible to cryptic.
Here’s a video, but be sure to also check out Fondation Cartier’s website for more info.
Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris, 2009 from Evan Roth on Vimeo.
Just got the latest Other Criteria newsletter and even though I confess I haven’t heard of Gary Webb before I liked the look of what I saw on offer, even if the prices are beyond the reach of mortal man. Each piece is a completely unique sculpture, what I first noticed was how much of Webb’s particular sense of humour comes through in his work, artistically performing something like a DJ mixing a ‘mash-up’. At first glance you feel you’re expected to pass your critical eye over works that seem to address the formal interplay of geometric and organic shapes you can find in a lot of 1960s Modernist sculpture. Thankfully Webb pushes the envelope a lot further than that, be it use of materials, a plethora of kitsch and pop references, manufacturing techniques, and even to a degree, scale.
Offering far more than a reproduction of retro style, it’s intriguing how the objects in question give off a veneer of functionality, perhaps it’s all down to the creative process, but unlike much of sculpture Webb’s pieces assume an illusion of purpose beyond that of the metaphysical or emotionally evocative. The thin line that Webb walks between the world’s of art and design provides an avenue of discussion so prevalent in the arts community, the death of form and function. Purpose is questionable, rationality is ultimately subjective when brought into a wide enough arena of debate.
The deceptively lightheartedness of some of Webb’s references and titles ironically adds weight to the artist’s oeuvre of perceptual and practical decision making processes, the sculptures stand true to themselves, self-serving in their raison d’aître, the viewer is immediately entangled in a mesh of contradictory critique and logic. The shapes and forms registering subconsciously as something approaching a modern-day primal consensus, biology, childhood memories, the artificiality of the modern manufactured reality we live in, the instinctive urge for both solace and acceptance, conception of life, the list is endless.
2009 – Cast aluminium, car spray paint – 930 x 190 x 280 mm. The geometry of this work reminds me somewhat of the early limitations of computer game graphics, in particular how 3D environments tended to reduce down to a series of polygons. Furthermore I find it rather amusing, perhaps merely due to my particular childhood, essentially a similarity in shape and form to Rubik’s Snake. I waited rather a long time to dive into the Rubik’s Cube craze of the 1970s – in fact I waited a few years until cheap copies began to appear at the local market. I struggled for a week or two but by the time I had mastered the puzzle it was over for me, I wasn’t desperate as some kids at the time, willing to impress the playground by achieving the once impossible in fewer and fewer seconds at a time. The Rubik’s Snake was far less popular, at that age I and many other school kids needed concrete reality, hard and fast answers, the feeling of accomplishment. The purpose of The Snake was dubious to say the least, something more ethereal, open to interpretation, incapable of forming another ‘craze’. The notion of an ambiguity of purpose has followed me to the present day, however now ironically it is a feeling I relish, entrancement in an ideological bubble, space to think and breathe. To me this is what great sculpture should do, function as a door, a gateway to a new space unmeasured or quantified by Newtonian Physics. Beyond this is the idea of vibration, the flicker of recognition laced with a frequency of doubt. The title imbues the piece further, accentuating the idea of ‘vague space’, indecipherable dimensions. Rather like those of the inside of the body, even with the reassurance of science on our sides, most of us try not to imagine our unseen biology, leaving it to the imagination always being the first preference. For such dimensions mark out the height, width, depth and breadth of death rather than life. One eats, one digests, one defecates, the process in between remains invisible. If I were to pin point the exact position of a recently digested piece of food, I would most likely give as vague description as ’somewhere in the middle’.
2009 – Cast aluminium, brass and steel – 550 x 680 x 500 mm. Another vaguely biological piece. I don’t mean that in a derogative way, it not only physically ‘hangs’ in mid-air, so does it’s interpretation, flitting between corporate iconography and biological function. I can appreciate the use of colour as marking some semblance to the packaging and branding of Golden Virginia tobacco. However the shapes form, in my opinion, something of a ribcage and lungs, however abstract they maybe. Fusing the reality of the physical implications of smoking and corporate mythology in a way that almost enforces the flawed adage that ‘what does not kill me makes me stronger’. Instead of poor health and biological damage one is forced to view an almost alchemical process apparently created by the near mystical properties of the Golden Virginia Company’s secret blend of the finest strains of tobacco plants. Even as a child I was lured by the sumptuous packaging, dark green and gold, a packet of mystery, a parcel of unique and magical substances that I would only come to understand with age. That was back in the 1970s, there wasn’t a health warning in sight, except that of both of my grandfathers hacking up their lungs. Although one smoked a pipe, the other No. 6 cigarettes, both of which in my ill informed opinion must have been inferior, an opinion formed solely by the surface appearance of each product’s packaging. The pendulum-like object in the centre evokes a feeling of time passing, time running out even, a countdown from the beginning to the end of the process which can be both interpreted as negative, as in the decomposition of the purity of the surface, and seemingly positive and alluring process of the chrysalis, a transformation, a transmutation to a higher form – i.e death and the theory of consciousness.
Perhaps my favourite piece of the collection, Baby Legs fuses the comforting palette offered by many manufacturers targeting products at mothers and of course their newborns. The strange thing about these kind of products is the way they seem to stylistically balance in between medical symbols and signifiers, the technologies and tools of health, and the abstract world of a baby’s perception. Colours primarily chosen to calm, to sedate, to relax, followed soon by brighter and more garish hues for the toddler, far more active, far less introverted in their world of imagination, or perhaps even confusion. The construction of this sculpture is most certainly mother-like, the central object forming a womb, yet it also acts as mirror to its surroundings, ‘copying and mimicking’ its creator in order to adapt to a new and greater environment. A fascinating piece which belies its dimensions, offering yet another door or window into that vague space of new forms and meanings Gary Webb seems to artistically and emotionally inhabit.
See the rest of Gary Webb’s exciting sculptural pieces here or come and join Other Criteria to celebrate the launch of eleven unique art works. Thursday 16th July at their shop, 14 Hinde Street, London, W1U 3BG from 6-8pm.
Tags: Gary Webb, Hirst, London, Other Criteria, OtherCriteria.com, post modern, sculpture, UK art
