Alternative London

Graffiti gets a bad rep. And in many cases this is fair, buildings and streets defaced with scrawls of 'I luv Wendy' and tags with anxious political intent. Street art is a whole different kettle of fish though and this was demonstrated on the Alternative London walking tour which guided us around the Brick Lane and Spitalfields Market area of London to show us pieces by some of the worlds best street artists.

This area of London is like two worlds, separated by the old city walls but in no need of a physical barrier as the two worlds occupy the same space but are culturally and visually worlds apart. One the one side of Liverpool St for example is the great railway station, broad gate skyscrapers and the dripping wealth of the city. On the other, East End culture and the poverty to match. The street art is often considered a great rebellion, an opposition to culture but in situ it reads as more of a defence. A defence of hundreds of years of and old London melting pot of immigrant and East End culture. The city encroaches but the spray cans will prevail.

The art itself is fascinating. Not just paint on walls but a real exploration of people and their interaction with space around them.

Ronzo uses paint to define the juxtaposed worlds. His odd figures have a traditional graffiti look, but are more profound.

Vhils completely redefines the phenomenon of street art. He first plasters a wall an then implants explosives in the wet surface, blowing it away to reveal the image. Can it be graffiti and vandalism if he's creating the surface of his work too?

Space invader as the name suggests, creates tiny pieces from
Lego that recall the 1970s game. You move around the area spotting these tiny pieces which offer an aspect of the search. It's like hide and seek for the streets and enables people to fully interact with the area.

Despite the freezing March Saturday, we really enjoyed and fully recommend the Alternative London tour.

www.alternativelondon.com

Chris Bracey @ Scream

Chris Bracey's first ever solo exhibition of his incredibly fun art work. The pieces verge on the edge of. Being ready mates as Bracey uses neon letters and battered shop signs from reclamation yards. But he does something special to them, forcing them to be viewed as extraordinary kitch pieces. Some look like 1970s tattoos, some recall the Sex Pistols' iconic God Save the Queen single cover with the iconography of the deeply religiously symbolic teamed with Soho chic. As the pieces faintly hum with electric charge, you can't help but feeling similarly charged up in their presence. Professor Green certainly agreed, purchasing a piece for himself at the opening.

Light Show

Ironic perhaps to visit an exhibition entitled Light Show on the first day of 2013 that I've had any vitamin c and also the day NPower send us an extortionate energy bill. Our interaction with light is a profound sensory experience that determines how we view the world around us and how we feel, but due to modern life's reliance on the screen and on electrical lighting it is a necessary force we reckon with ever single day. This latest show at the Hayward Gallery explores light in everyday modern life.

The first piece you are greeted with us Leo Villareal's Cylinder II. This vast structure containing 19,600 LED lights is programmed to never show the same sequence twice. As with snowfall, the rain, fireworks and Christmas tree lights it is completely mesmerising and encapsulates feelings towards these natural and nostalgic phenomena.

In Slow Arc Inside a Cube IV, Conrad Shawcross's manipulation of light lets light lead the way, as it is the light source that manipulates the room and the viewer in this case. His engage robot explores the cube it inhabits and it's viewer beyond, changing the look of both as its pinpoint torch carves its way. The changing cubed pattern shadows take over the walls and bodies of those observing.

In the last room, strobe lights rain down on 27 different water features, causing them to pause and be observed in a completely surreal way. Reminiscent of cling film used to represent water in early Wallace and Gromit films, Olafur Eliasson's Model For a Timeless Garen, felt like a garden out if a horror film. Time and movement are paused and replayed making chutes and arcs of water freeze into the droplets of water they are made up from.

What these pieces show is that light is a manipulator and can also be manipulated. Our overexposure to light in modern life- from smartphone screens being the first thing we see in the morning, to the orange light-polluted London sky being the last thing we see at night- puts light at the centre of modern life.

As the sculptures on show are linked only by their use of light, these theoretical ideas behind the exhibition are a little lost. It did also, at times, feel as though each piece was a little lost in the battle for our visual attention. Still, each piece echoed an aesthetic beauty that makes the show well worth seeing.

It is impossible to escape electrical lighting and being forced so physically into the same space as it in an intense dose at the Hayward is overwhelming, questioning whether the light we use is too much. After receiving my electricity bill, I certainly think electric lighting is something I use too much. It was a relief to step out if the dark light show and back into the sunshine.

Tim Walker; Story Teller

Today I had a bizarre encounter with a giant doll, snails that were bigger than me and a swan love boat parked on an indoor beach of lurid fake sand. Tim Walker, who graduated in 1994 and spent the early years of his career wasted as a newspaper photographer, has spent the last decade creating weird and wonderful worlds for fashion to inhabit. He doesn't just photograph fashion, he helps create it. That unobtainable, exaggerated fun we associate with this fickle world is played out in Walkers work. From pastel Persian cats, to models hidden under beds made of bones, he leads fashion into the realm of impossible imagination.

The current retrospective at Somerset House allows us to experience his magic first hand, his giant doll is as eerie up close as she is chasing models through the woods.

Happy Halloween

I received a call from my housemates as I was en route home last night- the lollies had run out- we needed more supplies. It was only 6pm! The trick-or-treaters were out in force in the Clapham area. I told her we would hide in the lounge at the back of the house and pretend not to be in, before instantly feeling guilty about it and detouring to the local corner shop for a selection of sweets. I was ever so slightly spooked when the cost of the random selection was £6.66. Devilish!

Getting in the spirit, we carved our pumpkins, joyfully answered the door to hoards of kids covered in fake blood and then embarked on a scary trip out. Our local Picturehouse cinema was screening The Shining, a cult classic I have never seen before. It wasn't too scary that I couldn't sleep, but I was pleased I'd shut the curtains before leaving the house!

Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present

This exhibition is everything it promises and more. The tag line, simply 'photography past and present', underplays the vast array of questions raised in this dazzling showcase of old master paintings and photographic responses to them.

Flowers have long been used by painters in Vanitas pieces; visual reminders of the immediacy and inevitability of death. In photography this melancholy is pushed further. Sam Taylor Wood's iconic video installation of a plate of rotting fruit is both beautiful and repulsive at once; death creeps over the  fruit at a startling rate which compels the viewer to watch despite their knowing the inevitable is on its way. Sarah Jones' over-exposed photographs of rose bushes use the bight flash of the camera to block the daylight from the park the picture was taken in and suspend the roses in time and in blackness. Like picking a flower plucks it from reality and forces it into a bitter-sweet destiny of love and death, taking a picture, in Barthes is to be believed, captures reality in a cruel way so that the past always has the power to live beyond reality and be truly haunting.

Thomas Struth's long exposure photographs of families echo Victorian photographs where people didn't smile largely because posing was so boring. With Struth's work the personality of each sitter shines through and we are captivated by his images.

Ironically photography is banned in the National Gallery, to protect the original images. A photography exhibition where images such as Struth's National Gallery are displayed, recalls issues of Benjamin's aura. Whatever your thoughts on the power of the original, this exhibition is well worth seeing for yourself.

Night Paintings

Paul Benney; Night Paintings

Descending the grandeur of Somerset House from the luxurious Strand entrance, down the Stamp Stairs to the old workhouses and the Embankment side, is descending down to a less polished, more exposed part of the building. Stripped bare of oils on canvas, naval coats of arms and marble façades, the embankment galleries and lower-ground level perfectly complement Paul Benney's most recent show of works. Night Paintings are an eerie collection which document the artist's insecurities over what is just beyond the mirror. They transcend their surroundings; placed in Somerset House's old coal houses and and area aptly named Dead Houses, an underground passageway, where tombstones from Inigo Jones's demolished chapel have been laid to rest. 

The paintings are set to question religious iconography and challenge a traditional representations of such abstract forces. Benney doesn't intend to place religion in a contemporary setting, indeed he denies his work makes any political stance, setting him apart not only from traditional painters of icons, but also of modern artists who employ religious undertones. These paintings address our unconscious. Life-size figures of photographic realism reach out and apprehend us as we view them, beckoning us into a world we cannot see. The Tenant tries to touch you, to take you beyond what is real to where he is. We are confused and upset by this reaching, as though his figure seeks our help. Benney's innovative medium of oil and plastic resin makes the surface of the image seem penetrable; you almost want to jerk away from the paintings, scared you may get taken in.

Chandelier really gets to grips with the sense of nocturnal mystery. Suspended over a baron, unreal landscape is an elaborate lit chandelier. It hovers, somewhere between material and ethereal, lit and extinguished, perfection and smashed into thousands of shards. It's incredible a painting can hold you in such suspense. 

The defining piece in this exhibition has to be Snow in Jerusalem.Created from a photograph of the artist on a visit to the Holy Land, it makes this questioning of religion and art seem incredibly personal. Is it a vacation, or a pilgrimage? The snow has a temporal hold on a false reality that the artist, painted in a startling purple, is walking through to reach us at the end of the gravestone lined tunnel.

Sadly, its not all good. Pissing Death- a skeleton having a wee into a lake- is just aesthetically awful when lined up against some gems in the show. Whilst it is interesting to see a piece which harbours Benney's allegorical influences, the work of Goya and Velásquez is a far cry from such a crude allusion to the nature of death.

Benney's show is creepy, though provoking and completely insightful. The venue is completely fantastic and allows the paintings to feel like a part of something bigger, beyond the graves, beyond Somerset House and beyond the painter himself.