Thursday 28 April 2011

D*Face - The Cosmic Engineers

"D*Face" aka. Dean Stockton is a London based street artist, and the designer of the tattoo on my left shoulder. He grew up in London and had a childhood interest in graffiti, which he credits to Henry Chalfant's coverage of New York subway graffiti in Spraycan Art and Subway Art. Later Thrasher magazine's coverage of skateboard deck graphics led to his interest in stickers and the DIY mentality associated with skate and punk fanzines. He attended an illustration and design course and worked as a freelance illustrator/designer whilst honing his street work. He held his first major London solo exhibition, Death & Glory, at the Stolenspace gallery, which sold out in October 2006. D*Face was the owner and curator for the Outside Institute, a contemporary art gallery in London that focused on street art. In 2005 the Outside Institute moved and re branded to become the Stolenspace Gallery. In 2010, he collaborated with Christina Aguilera, on her album cover of Bionic. He has also continues to practice occasional street art, but is also making a transition to the world of fine art.

Much of his work takes well known images from pop art or other sources and defaces them. The Cosmic Engineers is a small original -  one of the first of a series based on cut up paperback books, reassembled and defaced by hand. This one featured in a show at Stolen Space Gallery in 2010.

Saturday 15 January 2011

Sam Taylor-Wood - Escape Artist (Green and Red)

Sam Taylor-Wood (born March 4, 1967) is an English film maker, photographer and conceptual artist, with close ties to some of the main figures in the Brit-Art movement. Her directorial feature film debut was the 2009 Nowhere Boy, a film based on the childhood experiences of The Beatles songwriter and singer John Lennon. There are several strands to Taylor-Wood’s work, one of which has explored notions of weight and gravity in elegiac, poised photographs and films such as Ascension (2003) and a series of self-portraits (Self Portrait Suspended I - VIII) that depict the artist floating in mid air without the aid of any visible support. Escape Artist (Green and Red) is a new print in this series produced for Counter Editions, a light jet digital c-type print on Fuji Crystal archive paper, 56.2x82 cm, signed and numbered by the artist on the reverse in an edition of 175. The introductory price of £550 is very good value for an image of this size. Retailing £850 as of April 2012.

“This photograph shows the artist suspended mid-air from brightly coloured helium balloons. "I have to hide my face in the pictures. It is a combination of hiding the grimacing pain - because I think that destroys the photograph - but it is also because I don't think you need to see my face." She said the pain was necessary as the photographs were a response to her fight against cancer. "I made them shortly after I was no longer referring to myself as an ill person," she said. "There is a definite sense of physical freedom from the constraints of illness”. Indeed, there is an air of the escape artist, of the magician, to these works. The artist does seem to be performing a miraculous act of levitation. The balloons surely aren’t enough to stop her slumped descent to the hard ground below. And so what is holding her up? Perhaps nothing less than an act of faith.“