The opening of ‘Subduction Zones’ at the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ is on Thursday 17th March from 17:00 – 19:00 www.Deltainc.nl
The opening will also be the warm up to the World Minimal Music Festival. Viral radio, Future Vintage, Subbacultcha and 22 tracks will take care of the music.
Some pictures from the show over at the Graffuturism blog
Brendan McCarthy – ‘Dream Tree’ illustration, 2008
(41.5 x 29.5 mm, pen and whiteout on paper).
Unpublished illustration for a story concept by Brendan McCarthy – ‘The Fabulous Dreamtrees’.
“The Dreamtree (is) a phantasmagorical tree whose fruit is the source of all dreams. Eat the fruit and experience the dream of yourself. It is the precious thing you will carry back to the waking world.”
– Swimini Purpose, 2005.
A couple of friends of mine, Remi/Rough and Augustine Kofie, are involved in a huge mural and gallery show in Vancouver right now, alongside artists Jerry ‘Joker’ Inscoe and Scott Sueme. They’ve just spent the past week painting two huge murals on the Moda Hotel and their four man show opened at the weekend at Becker Galleries for the rest of March.
Here are a few examples of work from the show (sorry but I’m a big Kofie fan).
Photos from the mural painting here, Remi’s photos of the gallery show here, official show website here (where they used a piece of a Kofie piece I own to illustrate him).
I saw about 90 minutes of this last night at the Hayward Gallery on the Southbank. They were screening the entire 24 hour film for free but for one day only so, by the time you read this, it will be over I’m afraid. Marclay’s piece is made from hundreds of snippets of films with the constant being a clock, or time keeping device, present in each scene. The piece starts at 6pm and every clip corresponds to the actual time you are watching it which creates a vortex in which you are hyper aware of each passing minute.
It is hypnotic, fascinating and frequently funny, even though there is no plot, central character or conclusion in sight. The soundtrack creates amazing tension and release moments too, as you can imagine. If a clock is featured in a film it’s usually signaling someone waiting or something about to happen, a race against time or some sort of horror about to awaken. The approach to the hour becomes the equivalent of a major plot event and something that you’re willing to happen faster than it ever will. I saw the section before midnight and on the hour there was a large montage of clocks striking terror into the heart accompanied by suitably demonic music, all ended by a hilarious clip of a grandfather clock opening to reveal a zombie woman which was so perfectly timed the whole audience burst out laughing.
Most people won’t be able to sit through the whole thing and you don’t need to to ‘get’ it but there’s much more to the piece than the basic premise. Certain images become a recurring motif ; lighting candles or ringing phones for instance, and footage from several films repeatedly crops up giving it a certain continuity. I was surprised at how watchable it was, despite having no ending in sight. Waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge sometime after 1am, I looked across the river to the see the giant clock near Enbankment Station, as if starring in my own personal version of the film. Recommended viewing even if you can only catch a small portion of it.
These appeared on the web recently, no one seems to know whether they are original 80’s posters or more recent versions. Fascinating nevertheless.
A match made in heaven, not sure exactly what he’s doing with them yet but an official announcement was made last week that Ashley Wood has partnered with Bandai, the makers of Gundam figures, to do something. Here’s a first look at a painting he did earlier this week – beautiful
I just went to see Norman Rockwell’s America at the East Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Utterly stunning. It’s only on for another month and they have original paintings, studies and prints as well as over 350 framed covers of the Saturday Evening Post that he did. If you’ve been thinking of giving it a go, make the effort, you won’t see another collection like this in the UK again for a while I think. They even had the original of this April Fools painting below.
Brighton residents Snub23 and Req head up a collection of artists presenting work on anything but paper and canvas.
Kid Acne – ‘TTC – C’eci N’Est Pas Un Disque’ LP inside cover illustration (full piece), 2001-2
(640 x 380 mm, pen and pencil on paper).
The full piece was created using photocopies of two A3 illustrations depicting the crowd characters. These were then joined and the club background added in thinner pen. The DJs were also added at this stage to complete the scene.
Kid Acne – ‘TTC – C’eci N’Est Pas Un Disque’ LP inside cover illustration (right hand side), 2001-2 (420 x 297mm, pen and pencil on paper).
Originally one half of a crowd scene to go on the inside of a gatefold cover for TTC’s first LP. The label couldn’t afford a gatefold sleeve so it was printed on the inside of a single sleeve, the left half is thought to be lost.
Further to the post about 3D I did last week, I’ve dug out some of the comics I was talking about. Best find was ‘Bizarre 3D Zone’ which is almost Zap Comix in 3D form, including a strip by Robert Williams which works extremely well visually. There were a few underground comics in the the 60’s and 70’s using 3D it seems but not all of them work because the printing is so bad the red/green division can’t be seen too easily.
A company called Blackthorne Publishing spearheaded the 3D comics surge in the late 80’s, buying up licenses to lots of kids shows like Transformers, GI Joe and Star Wars. Their most successful line was, bizarrely, the California Raisins (!?) but they bit off more than the could chew when they acquired the rights to print Michael Jackson’s ‘Moonwalker’ in 3D. The film didn’t do the business expected and their comic flopped, costing them the company. Most of their titles only ran for 1 or 2 issues and the projected Star Wars line (surely a golden ticket?) only made it to issue 3 before the company folded.
In Bizarre 3D Zone there are a few singular page strips that crop up that are quite bizarre indeed, some don’t even work in the conventional 3D way as they are simply only either the green or red. But in amongst the other separated images they give an odd effect and you realise that this is the ultimate in psychedelic comics as it’s playing with your perceptions of the page. I can only imagine what it was doing to hippies on acid way back when.
Part 2 – ‘Part2ism’ outline, 2011 (420 x 297mm, biro on paper)
The first in an occasional, on-going series featuring original objects and art with, where possible, the items that they were made for.
For no reason other than they did some great sleeves. (Click for bigger version)
Last year I had an inexplicable yearning to buy more comics again after largely dipping out of the medium for a few years (save for the weekly dose of 2000ad thrill power and a few others). I also started to dig in the 50p-£1 boxes for older things I read as a kid or just liked the look of. Along the way I picked up a number of 3D comics from the boom in the late 80’s as well as a couple for more recently. When they work they’re great but frequently the writing never matches up to the standard of the imagery. There’s a whole blog post to be had out of some of those but that’s for another time.
This week I’ve been experimeting with 3D analyphs on a project – converting a 2D image into 3D when you look at it with those red and blue glasses. It’s not that hard, fun, if not a bit frustrating, and involves a bit of guesswork. I’ve managed to make one successful image so far but I can’t post it yet as I’ll get in trouble if it’s available to all at this stage.
But what should turn up on Jim Mahfood‘s Facebook stream today? News of a new book by Tristan Eaton (he designed the Dunny & Munny figures for Kidrobot) full of 3D images by a ton of different artists. Four years in the making, the 224 page book, published this Spring by Prestel, features a little bit of his work and a lot of Tristan-curated images from 100 artists across a multitude of disciplines: graffiti, illustration, contemporary art, graphic design, etc.
Check some images that I found online at animalnewyork.com and you can pre-order the book here.
The full artist list (with the ones I’m excited to see in bold): DRIAN JOHNSON, ANDREW BELL, ANTHONY AUSGANG, ASKEW, BASK, BILL MCMULLEN, BLOKT, BOOKS, BUFF MONSTER, CALMA, CASEY RYDER, CATALINA ESTRADA, CEY ADAMS, CHRIS MARS, CRAOLA, D*FACE, DABS & MYLA, DALEK, DAVE COOPER, DAVE KINSEY, DAVE NEEDHAM, DAVID FLORES, DEMO, DR. REVOLT, DARREN ROMANELLI, EBOY, EDATRON, ERIK FOSS, ERIC WHITE, ERIC HAZE, ESAO ANDREWS, FILTH, FLORENCIA ZAVALA, GARY BASEMAN, GARY TAXALI, GLENN BARR, GOMEZ BUENO, ISABEL SAMARAS, JAMES JEAN, JEFF SOTO, JEREMY FISH, JEREMY MADL, JERRY ABSTRACT, JIM HOUSER, JIM MAHFOOD, JOE SORREN, JON BURGERMAN, JULIE WEST, JUNKO MIZUNO, KANO, KATHY STAICO SCHORR, KENZO MINAMI, KEVIN BOURGEOIS, KEVIN SKINNER, KID ACNE, KOBIE SOLOMON, KRISTIAN OLSON, LAURA BARNHARD, LOGAN HICKS, MARK BODE, MARK DEAN VECA, MARK JAMES, MARK RYDEN, MATT CAMPBELL, MATT EATON, MAYA HAYUK, MICHAEL DE FEO, MISHKA, MINT AND SERF, MISS VAN, MORNING BREATH, MR JAGO, MYSTERIOUS AL, NATHAN FOX, NATHAN JUREVICIUS, PETE FOWLER, POSE MSK, RAY ZONE, RENATA PALUBINSKAS, RICH JACOBS, RON ENGLISH, ROSTARR, SHEPARD FAIREY, SKET ONE, STANLEY CHOW, STASH, STEPHEN BLISS, TARA MCPHERSON, TES ONE, TODD SCHORR, TOKIDOKI, TOM THEWES, TRAVIS LOUIE, TRAVIS MILLARD, TRISTAN EATON, TRUSTOCORP, UNKL, UPSO, AND WINSTON SMITH.
I was in Paris last Friday, playing at La Machine, but upon waiting for the Eurostar the next day I saw a poster for a Moebius Exhibition at the Foundation Cartier. Gutted not have known this was on earlier as I could have seen it before I left. The link above takes you to the exhibition site with a wealth of info, images, beautiful videos of Moebius drawing and mouth-watering merchandise, check the pencil sets below.
[youtube width=”640″ height=”480″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZWX4hMZpdg[/youtube]
Yet another late 80’s coincidence: I saw this film in late ’89 or early ’90 on UK terrestrial TV as filler between programs. I’ve wanted to see it again for over 20 years and I finally found it on YouTube. It’s an animation by Danish director Lejf Marcussen called ‘Den Offentlige Rost’ (The Public Voice, 1988) and it’s a simple idea executed fantastically. It starts out pretty simply but starts getting interesting around the 2.40 mark and it’s all done by hand, no computer graphic trickery apparently – stunning. I can only keep searching for a better copy now.
I was recently asked to play at a night called Classic Material, run by Chris Read and Nick Armitage. The idea for this is to give each month over to a year from Hip Hop’s past and only play tracks released during it. DJ Format did ’87 (entirely on 45’s!), Andy Smith – ’88 and I was given 1989. ’89 was a special year for me as it was the year I moved away from my home and parents and started studying in London, a city I’ve remained in for more than half my life now.
It was also a year rich in musical delights with the beginnings of gangster rap taking over Hip Hop and the emergence of De La Soul‘s Daisy Age with their incredible ‘3 Feet High & Rising’ album. Actually possibly my top three all-time favourite Hip Hop albums were released in ’89, the aforementioned ‘3 Feet High…’, the Beastie Boys‘ ‘Paul’s Boutique’ and the Jungle Brothers‘ ‘Done By The Forces of Nature’.
The Beasties’ album was critically mauled at the time but has undergone a reappraisal since and is now hailed as the classic it is but the Jungle Brothers’ record is still only really feted by Hip Hop heads in the know. It’s their strongest record with as much inventiveness as the De La album if not quite the wackiness of Prince Paul‘s production. In it you can hear the whole blueprint for the Native Tongues movement that was beginning to emerge but also a precursor to Deee-Lite‘s ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ – which would be the anthem of 1990 – Towa Tei was even involved in aspects of the record. On the west coast the Dust Brothers were in their most high profile period with Tone Loc, Young MC and the production of the Beastie’ record. The whole NWA/Ruthless Records camp was basking in the glory of ’88’s ‘Straight Outta Compton’ and surrounding releases like the D.O.C‘s ‘No One Can Do It Better’ album.
Hip House and the general speeding up of Hip Hop was the order of the day with a lot of UK only remixes of licensed US tracks having this edge to them. Alongside this you had the Stone Roses’ debut album and the whole Maddchester scene as well as the fallout from the acid house excess of the previous year making it’s mark on both the charts and surrounding music genres. S’Express made their best records and Tim Burton‘s first Batman was the film of the summer, complete with soundtrack by Prince.
Whilst all this was going on I was doing my Foundation course in Art and Design in Reigate and used the screen printing facilities to make some custom T-shirts for myself and others featuring De La Soul surrounded by psychedelic lettering I drew. It’s with this design that I want to illustrate the mix I put together for Classic Material, done completely on vinyl – what a pain that was after using Serato for 5 years!
’88 was great but ’89 is mine by DJ Food
Elsewhere J Saul Kane was starting his own journey with the first Depth Charge releases on DC Recordings but that comes to fruition about five years down the line.
Found this on the web whilst looking for something else, nice idea, no idea where the original picture comes from, presumably an ancient sci-fi novel. Not sure if Avatar would be quite so action packed with this director at the helm.
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I’ve been going through stuff, more info on the individual pieces plus a few more on my Flickr (click any picture)
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Tuff Times, Non Stop, Hell Raisers – The Pit, Ladbroke Grove, London, ’80s
Funké – CazBee, under the Westway, Ladbroke Grove, London, ’80s
Non Stop Are World Destruction – Kilburn, London, 80s
Enigma 137 – Rebel, under the Westway, Ladbroke Grove, London, ’80s
JUSTICE / MUM, The Pit, Ladbroke Grove, London, ’80s
I’ve been going through stuff, more info on the individual pieces plus a few more on my Flickr (click any picture)
‘The Earth’s Edge’, Trellick Tower, London, UK, ’80s
‘It’s Time 4 War’ – All Star Kings, The Pit, Ladbroke Grove, London, ’80s