LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

'Little Heroes' by Roy's People, at the Curious Duke Gallery

Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

The idea of miniature people picking their way through our lives is seductive. From the fairy circles of folklore through the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man to Mary Norton's The Borrowers, audiences thrill to the idea of another world hiding in plain sight. It's also experienced a small renaissance in urban art, with Slinkachu, Marcus Crocker and Roy's People all creating miniature dramas, comedies and tragedies right underneath the noses of unsuspecting Londoners. 

Little Heroes proves to be an exhibition of two halves: one informed by politics and punky satire, the other by superhero poptimism. The latter is familiar territory for the artist, subverting the urban landscape by hiding tiny, pointed messages in plain sight. Here discarded bottle caps are repurposed as umbrellas, drug dealers and their clients haggle over the price of a gigantic ecstasy pill and a man aims his rifle at a gigantic Twitter symbol.

Recyclapool 1

A decent chunk of the appeal comes from their positioning. Roy periodically creates these tiny models and hides them across London (and other cities and towns), including a little note that explains what they are. This gently subverts the urban space into a creative one: even though the chances of discovering one are minimal, the knowledge that they're out there is a thrill. Even within the gallery there's rewards for the eagle-eyed observer - men sat cross-legged on power sockets, pursuing each other across picture frames or strutting along the skirting board.

Killer Heels

In the iconography there's a strong street art influence; repurposing corporate iconography to create bitesize political statements. This dovetails beautifully into a view of the individual dwarfed by corporations. As they clamber over crumpled drinks cans or vainly try to shove a pair of colossal Louboutin heels off a body, the traditional relationship with trademarks, style and brand is subverted - the public revealed less as consumer and more as victim.

Obama's Bandits

This is best exemplified in my favourite piece here, Obama's Bandits. Here we see the President and First Lady perched atop a crumpled Budweiser can, with three machine-gun wielding cops in front of them. They're facing off against an angry crowd of protesters, with one man bleeding out on the ground in front of them, his fallen placard reading "Stop Racist Police". It's almost too blunt, but that just amplifies the indignation, the piece bristling with commentary on race, violence and the sinister entanglement of business and politics.

That's all great stuff, so it's a shame that the superhero themed works that give the exhibition its title aren't quite as good. These show tiny figures casting giant silhouettes of DC and Marvel heroes - Spider-man, Batman, Superman, Catwoman, Hulk and so on. The implicit message is that no matter how downtrodden you may feel, you have the spirit of a superhero lurking deep you. It's an unabashedly optimistic outlook (one I can't really disagree with), yet feels at odds with the rest of the work.

We Are Heroes - Batman

As noble and benevolent as these characters are in their fictional universes, they're as much corporate symbols as Coke cans and McDonalds restaurants, elements that the artist is eager to satirise elsewhere. In deifying them like this there's the uneasy promotion of assimilating corporate IPs into our psychology. Also unexamined is the adolescent power fantasy represented by the superhero. There's just something a bit shallow about the implied positivity of a man imagining himself as Batman - presumably fantasising about being a billionaire vigilante assaulting the poor in dank alleyways.

I guess it boils down to the simple fact that superheroes are incredibly popular right now and that works featuring them are more likely to sell to apolitical customers. After all, the artist has to put a crust on his plate, and going a bit commercial is hardly the worst crime in the world. Still, there's the sense that this is ever-so-slightly the easy way out: riding on the coat-tails of Warner Bros and Disney's intellectual property rather than subverting it.

Even though I didn't much like those, there's still more than enough crammed into Curious Duke to make Little Heroes a more than worthwhile visit. Throughout there's a clean, clear and attractive aesthetic sense which, in combination with heaping dollops of creativity and an anti-authoritarian streak make it easy to recommend. Check it out!

Little Heroes is at Curious Duke Gallery, Whitecross Street, until 9th May. Information here.

Sunday, July 6, 2014

(60) Days of Summer at Curious Duke Gallery

Sunday, July 6, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Just a quick report from Curious Duke, my favourite local gallery.  They're on a bit of a winning streak at the moment with their exhibitions, picking punkish young artists with street-honed sensibilities and a drive to reexamine the cityscape.  For the last few months they've exhibited the work of individual artists, but now that the summer's here they've put forward a multitude of works.  Here's some things that caught my eye:

First up was Mark Powell's Needle Craft, a bic biro drawing upon an antique document.  I immediately found this wistful, relaxed picture of Amelia Earhart incredibly sad. The Earhart story of a woman successfully battling against gender boundaries and grasping the infinite freedom of the clear blue sky has a pleasing poetry to it.  Counterbalancing this joy is the tragedy of her mysterious death while trying to fly around the world.  Powell's piece marries much of this into one image, Earhart posing with practical, posed femininity and pausing to look at a plane soaring through the clouds.  

Needle Craft - Mark Powell (sorry for the reflections)

Interposed between the two Powell has inserted one of his trademark birds.  Rendered in scientific, clinical detail its placement has an air of the hallucinogenic to it, as if this is the representation of the thoughts flickering through Earhart's mind at this particular moment.  The bird feels like an omen of her eventual demise and perhaps an indication of the aviatrix forever reincarnated in the the skies.  Exacerbating this sad air is the aged, ragged edges of the magazine, what was once forward looking and futuristic is now slowly being forgotten and destroyed.

Miley Smash Hits - DS

Now, in one unlikely stride we move from Amelia Earhart to Miley Cyrus.  DS's Miley Smash Hits is perhaps one of the most brazenly cheesed up pictures I've ever seen on a gallery. This is the epitome of the ephemeral; a screengrab of Cyrus from the Wrecking Ball video with some crude photoshop filters applied over the top smashing up the Disney logo.  In the corner stands Mickey Mouse, quite understandably glaring in annoyance.  As a visual depiction of Cyrus's metamorphosis from squeaky clean teen queen to crotch rubbing, tongue lashing party bitch it's pretty effective... but why?! It's the kind of image that'd be right at home blaring out from a Camden Market T-Shirt shop; something devoid of class, subtly and taste - but I kind of love it.  I respect the gumption of any artist that exhibits something that waggles a middle finger this hard in the face of bourgeois respectability and aesthetics.

But what most jumped off the walls at me here was Dan Rawling's Building the Den 01 & 02. These are antique wood saws that've been assaulted with a plasma cutter, forestry scenes being carved from the sheet metal of the saws.  First and foremost they are beautiful, intricate objects; the worn sturdiness and weight of the saw contrasting perfectly against the detail of the design upon them.  The minute gaps beetween the leaves of the branches are a sight to behold - organic chaos in flat metal.  But there's also a playful humour in action here - a hall of mirrors effect in which the very thing the saw is meant to destroy is outlined in such beauty.  It's ace.

This is but a small taster - there's a ton of interesting stuff down at Curious Duke.  Much of it I've covered before in these pages - from the satirical microcosms of Roy's People to the stylish fashion dogs of Agnetha Sjögren to Tannaz Oroumchi's warped maps of London to Darragh Powell's apocalyptic, deathy bird populated cityscapes.

With the Whitecross Street Party scant weeks away the street has begun its annual blossoming into a nerve centre of the London art world.  Curious Duke sits at the epicentre of this, and (60) Days of Summer works as a perfect smörgåsbord of what's in store for us over the next few months.  Whet your appetite, check it out and tell 'em London City Nights sent you.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Tannaz Oroumchi: 'Hectified' at Curious Duke Gallery, Whitecross Street

Saturday, May 3, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Mapping London is a fool's errand.  Sure you can catalogue the rough geometry and index off street names, but this doesn't get you any closer to understanding what the city is. London is 2000 years of wonderfully gunked up, unplanned human muck; Saxon hunting trails made permanent by imperial Roman road builders, streets spiralling out from them like bacterial growths, a million tangled pissy alleys growing out of that.  Capturing all this on paper is madness.  Your Google Maps and your London A-Z merely diagram out the space, trying hard to boil down fuzzy anarchy into comprehension - but these maps can't capture the mood of a place; the baked in sleaze of Soho; the cool authoritarianism of Kensington or the enterprising fragility of Brick Lane.

Tannaz Oroumchi obviously understands these limitations, her work exhibited in Curious Duke Gallery chopping and screwing the streets London to brilliant effect.  Under her eye the street layout twists into spider-webs, computer generated graphs, bacterial infections and micro-printed circuit boards. London transforms into a pulsating, electric organism, the apparent permanence of concrete and steel revealed as flexible, temporary and, above all, manipulable.

Reading the Rosetta Stone of the City, transforming static into fluid motion and exposing the psychological layers and contours of urban life, is an idea (if you'll excuse the pun) very much up my street.  This field of thought is known as psychogeography, defined by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals."  Planting its roots deeply in the Marxist anti-authoritarianism of the French Situationists, the discipline of psychogeography seeks to chip away the 'taught' methods of navigating urban space, underlining the importance of deviation from established paths, exploration and reclamation of restricted spaces and the ability to emotionally analyse architecture and street layout.

In Oroumchi's work the city is stripped of its labels, the tangle of London streets revealed as a crazy mandala - the product of thousands of years of unguided, unconscious human endeavour.  The work reveals the biological nature of London, and how it frustrates attempts at applying systems of order to it - something that makes this city more human and honest.  The grids of New York, Los Angeles et al are designed for efficiency and ease of commerce; maps of capital.  They're efficient and slick in a way London can never be -  foe example barely a quarter of central London's streets are used for traffic circulation, as opposed to 90% of New York's.  

That London is a knot inevitably means planners are tempted to untangle it; notable candidates being Christopher Wren post-Great Fire of London with his vision of a London subdivided into grand Parisian boulevards and Corbusian post-war architects, whose ambitions to wrestle London into becoming a 'car city', with the Strand pummelled into a motorway and any extant pedestrians frowned upon as a vestigial aberration.

It's a nightmare vision, imagine the entire city in the style London Wall and Upper Thames Street. The maps on display in Hectified elegantly refute the ordering of cities, finding  beauty in the snaking, sinuous lines, and throwing up their own subtle analyses of the motions of people around the metropolis.  Focal points quickly become apparent; St Paul's Cathedral has a peculiar gravity, it's historicity sending ripples into the street plans around it.  Similarly, the parts where the tangle doesn't intrude become marked out as pure, sacred spaces.  The reality of Smithfield Meat Market is a grubby place of smashed pallets, bloody smocks and bald, racist men, but here it's appropriately revealed as an oasis of permanence - after all meat has been sold here for a thousand years or so.

When you see these maps your first instinct is to try and place yourself within them. Usually the easiest way to start is with the Thames, counting the bridges across, then winding your way up through the streets until you find yourself.  It's irresistible, and this simple act makes the work almost auto-analytical. My barometer of appreciation of art involves finding something of yourself in the work; an echo of your individual passions and philosophies in it. In pinpointing your location you are you have to think about your personal relation to the city, to divorce yourself from boundaries, districts and names and analyse the layout of the streets around you.  That this occurs instinctively makes the work a success, achieving its aim of throwing new light on London without any prodding explanation or lecture.

What Oroumchi demonstrates with Hectified is the mystery and joy of London; an anatomical study of a city achieved without killing it.  She lays bare the maze of gloomy side-streets, bustling arterial traffic routes and semi-abandoned leafy squares that give London its vibrancy and character.  When you walk through the streets of London, seeing imperial Portland Stone give way to the stained clay of London Stock Bricks, enjoying the dichotomy of 16th century churches abutting the glittering green glass of 20th century finance, marvelling at something so bizarre as a Roman pavement sunk in a secret crypt, or a 3000 year old monument bristling out of the Thames, you should understand that London as a whole is a manifestation of humanity, a patchwork blanket created by the consensus of millions upon millions of human beings for thousands of years.  

Oroumchi's Hecitified lays all that this out simply, clearly and without ego.  I very, very much enjoyed it.

Hectified is at Curious Duke Gallery, Whitecross Street until May 31st

Saturday, February 22, 2014

'Curio-City' at Curious Duke Gallery, 20th February 2014

Saturday, February 22, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

My heart lies in Whitecross Street. If I was to be trapped there forever I think I could just about cope: there's a cinema, a supermarket, numerous great restaurants, kickin' takeaways, a world food market and a smattering of art galleries. It's these that I appreciate the most, little cultural flavour bombs - the glace cherry in the middle of a delicious Bakewell tart.

Curious Duke used to be tucked away in a little ground floor / basement shop at the top of the street. It was cosy enough but those heading downstairs risked bonking their heads onthe low ceiling and it was easy to overlook among the throbbing hum of weekday burrito-seeking office workers. Nobody's going to miss Curious Duke now though, they've relocated to the handsome corner space at 173 Whitecross Street.  

With sunlight streaming in through the windows, the faint perfume of baking pizza dough from Cozzo over the road and the clickety-clack of hammer on wood from the framers in the next room its undeniably a step-up for Curious Duke, a chance for them to spread their wings and show the world what they got. So it's appropriate that this opening exhibition is a kind of 'Greatest Hits', a parcelling up of the London-focussed, pop-inflected and gently humorous themes that I've seen across Curious Duke's last few exhibitions.

Watchtower (the Hill has Eyes) - Darragh Powell

As someone that loves London I've always got time for art that explores the psychic undercurrents and symbols that power the city.  So perhaps its predictable that the first thing I gravitate to is Darragh Powell's paintings of London occupied by hordes of crows.  In Watchtower (the Hill has Eyes) we see a familiar piece of street architecture surrounded by a murder of crows in flight.  Everyone is familiar with the legend of the ravens of the Tower of London: "if the ravens leave the Tower, the kingdom will fall…".  Fortunately for Queen and country the Tower raven's wings have been sufficiently mutilated to physically prevent them from flying away (which seems like a bit of a loophole to me).  But Powell's crows are in rude health and full flight, making a mockery of their captive cousins.  Perhaps the crow is the more appropriate modern symbol of London anyway; intelligent, beautiful and yet a scavenger - feeding on the remains of others.

London Slithers - Tannaz Oroumchi

Continuing these askew views of London are Tannaz Oroumchi's London Slithers and London Bobble.  They're maps of the City of London and the surrounding neighbourhoods, entirely stripped of all explanation - making them next to useless as aids to navigation, but fascinating as a psychogeograpical way to understand the development of the city.  My favourite of the two, London Slither, shows the street plan of the city as a quasi-organic structure, something you might see growing inside a Petri dish.  It's a reminder of the way this city evolved: Anglo-Saxons walking down ancient Roman roads, Tudors building atop the filth of the middle ages, Victorians cramming slums on top of those ramshackle buildings and finally we Neo-Elizabethans sinking huge towers of steel and glass right through these historical strata, deep into the primordial London clay.

One of Sam Peacock's Unseen Landscapes

This theme of analogue biological fuzziness continues with one of Sam Peacock's Unseen Landscapes.  They're impressively tactile works, odd materials bulging out from the a metal surface, capturing the light flickering across every single crenellation. There's something disconcertingly sludgy about these pieces, the rusty reds and browns on top of metal looking like a toxic waste spill, heavy metals leaching into rivers and streams.  On a slightly more positive note this gooeyness also could be life giving too, the coastline of some faraway planet, or an undersea amoebic soup pregnant with life.  Either way it's pretty neat to look at.

Miracle - Roys People

Much of what's on display here showcases a slightly removed view of the world, something that's at the forefront in Roy's People's miniature dioramas, featuring teeny-weeny models of people engaged in surreal behaviours in urban landscapes.  A man waters a dandelion that's burst through concrete, someone pushes a cart laden with tiny berries across a huge road, but my favourite is I Come in Peace, showing two tiny army men with guns squaring off against a snail.  There's a whiff of 1950s atomic age science fiction to this; the picture in the same tradition as the giant ants of Them! or the prehistoric killer molluscs of The Monster That Challenged the World.  Somehow the snail has a kind of deadpan insouciance, clearly not giving a toss about the guns or barked warnings thrown in his direction.  Roy's People are going to be holding an exhibition here in a few months - I can't wait.

This was a kind of artistic buffet, a manifesto of the themes and imagery that Curious Duke wants to explore. I'm pretty fortunate that a gallery that aligns largely with my own sensibilities has opened up not far from my house, and I can't wait to see what they're going to do with this prominent position on the street.  In the midst of a cold, grey and wet winter, it's stuff like this that brightens up the dull days, sending much-needed shards of sunlight piercing through the clouds.

Curio-City is at the Curious Duke Gallery until 28th March, 173 Whitecross Street, EC1Y 8JT

Thursday, November 14, 2013

'Agnetha Sjögren: The Story' at Curious Duke Gallery

Thursday, November 14, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

My Angel

Sometimes it feels like artists don't know how to have fun.  Gallery after gallery is stuffed full of painfully serious works about the nature of loneliness, symbolic acts of torture and your bog-standard crushing misery of existence.  Not here though! Sjögren's The Story is a tour through the artist's life through the medium of model dogs wrapped in various coverings; each with a name, backstory and even a personalised passport.  

The most common type of wrapping are vintage comic-books, so we see dogs covered in panels from Tintin, Batman, Modesty Blaise and The Phantom.  Others are dressed up as Prada handbags, sprinkled with gold dust, wrapped in designer fabrics, embossed with Union Jacks or dressed in intricate patterned leather to give the effect of chocolate. It's refreshingly upbeat stuff and I found it next to impossible to keep a smile from my face as I moved from dog to dog, each one teaching me a little more about the artist.

With such tight focus on dogs, it's a bizarre twist that Sjögren doesn't like dogs very much at all.  Through the work she explains that she seeks to create her ideal dog; in her words, a dog that doesn't "eat, bark, jump, bite, drool or need to go out for a poop.  They sit and stand nicely all day long." In some respects the subtraction of all these doggy attributes defeats the point.  After all, if it's not jumping up and licking your face, barking stupidly at nothing and shitting all over the rug is it really capturing the 'dogness' of a dog?  Somehow, even without all this, it does, and I'd go so far as to say that with this work Sjögren has captured something of the core of why they're man's best friend.

Chocolate

Unlike a person (or, for that matter, a cat) a dog will never judge you.  They unconditionally love their owner, and exist in a constant state of complete emotional nakedness.  They're so transparent in their feelings that they have a big wagging sign showing their exact mood stuck on top of their arse.  So, in choosing dogs as a canvas for her experiences she mirrors this openness, the essential honesty of the dog underlining her own.

It's theorised that dogs don't have the same perception of time as we do, they live in a series of infinities - always entirely in the present moment.  So, when we're there, we're there forever, and when we're away we're  gone forever.  Using them as a canvas to capture moments in time,  to convey a certain smell or sensation is therefore entirely appropriate. So even though Sjögren doesn't dogs very much, she definitely understands them.

The photographs and original dogs on display work as interesting design pieces in their own right, recalling Pascal Knapp's CowParade and Marc Spits' Elephant Parade, two very similar public art exhibitions where models of animals are given to local artists, schools and businesses etc to decorate and place around a city. Those exhibitions tend to function as street furniture; objects with the aim of looking neat and brightening up the place.  These dogs are similar, the difference being the addition of the individual and the continuity between the dogs; the descriptions alongside the work absolutely crucial to fully appreciate it.

Tant Gul

So, My Angel, while aesthetically pleasing in its own right, gains new gravity when we learn that it's composed of old bookmarks from the artist's childhood, some scavenged from generations of her family.  In Tintin Bang, we're told that "time spent reading them as a child took me away on adventures in my imaginary land."  The atmosphere is one of dreamy, half-remembered childhood, times when the fortitude of superheroes and brave secret agents felt like that most important thing in the world.  The most touching is Chocolate, decked out in embossed brown leather, looking good enough to eat - Sjögren explaining that this dog captures the smell of her grandmother's secret hot chocolate recipe.

Each dog has been constructed with careful attention to detail; particularly in the way the comic panels wind down around the dog, with special care taken as to which panels fall over the dog's paws, eyes and heart.  So we see "a perfect family" over one dog's heart, or Tintin descending a long rope down a dog's leg.  Special care has also been paid to the dog's arse something special being placed on each one.  On My Angel, there's a butterfly and wide-eyed cherubs staring out at you - a playful and clever touch that I appreciated.  Many of the dogs were only on display as photographs and was slightly frustrating knowing that they have these clever touches all over them that were hidden from them

I was a bit trepidatious that this exhibition was going to be overly saccharine.  The art I usually see is along the lines of people cutting their arms open with razorblades and gravely intoning about the death of the soul, so cute dogs with designs plastered over them is a swerve into fluffy loveliness. The height of this sweetness was a display around a little fireplace with Christmas baubles hanging over it, dogs of various designs gathered around, their leads resting on the floor.  

Prada

This powers into the realm of kitsch with reckless abandon, and when Sjögren told me she had a background in designing the layout of shop windows a piece of the puzzle fell into place. Given the focus on the artist's personal experiences this art could very easily be dismissed as a touch solipsistic and if you're even more uncharitable, the dog focus could be read as a bit commercially minded.  But frankly I don't care, this stuff was a welcome break from much of the art I've seen lately, which is all-too-often cold, conceptual and abstract to the point of unfriendliness.  Here there's an aura of happiness and innocence that I was powerless to resist.  The longer I looked, the more I could feel an oddly festive spirit unfurling inside me.

Cute?  Yup.  Kitsch? Almost certainly. Shallow? Arguably. Warm-hearted and playful? Definitely.

'Agnetha Sjögren: The Story' is at Curious Duke Gallery, 207 Whitecross Street, EC1Y 8QP until 6th December - open Monday to Friday 11:30 - 18:30, Saturday 12:00 - 16:00.

Friday, May 31, 2013

'Insider Gallery' Launch at Curious Duke Gallery, 30th May 2013

Friday, May 31, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

I reckon if you live in London, you have a duty to force-feed yourself as much culture as you can possibly stomach.  This can involve venturing to the mysterious outer ends of the Tube network, but occasionally it's as simple a task as walking five minutes down the street from your front door.  I live in Whitecross Street and I love it.  By day there's a famous world food market, by night there's a great fish and chip shop as well as some great Chinese, Turkish, Italian and Japanese restaurants.  To top it off there's two nice pubs, an achingly cool coffee shop, a well stocked Waitrose and a 24 hour off-licence.  At the end of the street is the Barbican Arts Centre! It's a brilliant place to live!

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