The Null Device

Recently in art

A few art-related items today: firstly, Boing Boing's Offworld video-game blog has a gallery of video-game-inspired artwork by Melbourne street artist/illustrator Ghostpatrol. It's mostly influenced by old Nintendo games, and is drawn in Ghostpatrol's characteristically organic twee watercolour style, avoiding the clichés of isometric/8-bit/pixel-art styles. Quite lovely stuff; I recommend listening to some Qua whilst looking through it.

Meanwhile, Josh Keyes is an artist who produces tableaux juxtaposing (or, indeed, mashing up) various forms of nature and urbanism, with varying degrees of ontological violence. The results (totem poles sprouting Halliburton-branded surveillance cameras, grizzly bears standing atop wrecked cars submerged in water, deer on sign-covered treadmills in space) are meticulously drawn, with the sort of absolutely deadpan realism of encyclopaedia illustrations:


Another artist dealing in retro-styled imagery and surreal juxtapositions is London-based Dan Hillier, whose oeuvre leans more towards surrealistic Victorian engravings:

One can find his prints for sale at the Old Truman Brewery market in Shoreditch on Sundays (where Your Humble Correspondent bought prints of the two above images).

Meanwhile, there is Banksy's ongoing exhibition at the Bristol City Museum, which is going until the end of the month. Entry is free, though prepare to wait up to four hours in the queue, and get there early. It's well worth it, though; Banksy's animatronics, for example, are superb, and his oil paintings and other non-stencil pieces are excellent (the large oil painting of Parliament occupied by chimpanzees, for example, is splendid). I had occasion to see it recently; my photos are here, though they don't quite capture the works in all their glory.

(According to The Times, Banksy charged the Bristol City Museum just £1 for putting on the exhibition, on the condition that all CCTV footage that could identify him was destroyed. Also, only four staff were informed of what was being planned (the rest were told that filming was taking place). Given the level of technical skill in his pieces, I suspect that the reason Banksy is so keen to keep his identity secret has to do not so much with fear of getting caught for illegal graffiti as fear of being outed as working for The Man; I wouldn't be surprised if his day job was in advertising, film production or similar.)

Finally, French street artist Invader (i.e., the chap who sticks tile mosaics of old-school video-game characters to high surfaces) is exhibiting in London until 17 September.

There are 1 comments on "Recently in art":

Posted by: datakid Wed Aug 19 09:25:21 2009

Would you believe I lived next to GP when I was in Tassie? I have a number of his (much earlier, less developed) pieces from 7 years ago, including a very nice stencil on the back of a 12" of Robert Livingston Seagull by Neil Diamond. If I recall he was selling off to raise money to move to Edinburgh at the time.