A Sign o the Times

The producers brushed my mind a tad.
Recently in Erdington, Ive seen a few new shops open on a kind of carnival high:
Fashion, Computors, Paint, Off Licences, Mini Supermarkets, Carpet shops, Nail shops, Card shops.
Only to sadly see them close.
It's a sign of the times.

These poor guys put all their savings in or took out huge loans only to loose their £s and their dream.
Its a sad place to be sitting in the middle of all your hopes and aspirations with nobody visiting, very lonely -its happened to me a couple of times.

Fandango.
What about if you were to set up a shop that was doomed to fail?
With nothing in it that really make any sort of profit.
Run by incompetant people and opened with a huge event,
and then simply left to run down.
With maybe a burglary and some vandalism.
"We will pick ourselves up from the ashes but still unfortunately fail."

Billboards

Billboards

The thing that appeals to me about this project is that it is actually in the public domain. It is also “of our time”

-everyone is used to seeing billboards, it would appeal to me to have the opportunity to jog or a little loosely shake people from what they happily conceive as the norm.In a city, I also can’t think of a much bigger passing audience save for the T.V.one.

Another positive is that this project is non-profit based and also non-gallery. There are not the normal artistic dictates, although there is going to be a greater emphasis on health and safety.

Two Issues.

At present in my practice, I am grappling with two issues.
They have always been there underlying my work, but I feel recently I have defined them and seem to be making progress on how to deal with the problem.

There are two sides to my practice:

The Narrative,
Where the business is about either defining something that has gone before or relating a story about something that is.

The Vessel,
The thing that allows the observer to construct their own “happening”, make up personal imaginings, within a home to hold them.

Possibly in a greedy way I ideally would be looking for two bill boards to cover and define these two angles of expression that I seem to be covering at present.

“A brief respite”

Aimed as a lift for tiredness, not exactly “man huts” but somewhere where you could imagine yourself away from it all – take your pick of which lodging you would like to be in!  They each will be different with various implied restfull activities going on.

The idea originates from Yoko Ono’s show in London where she met John Lennon. There was a large presence of white half furniture, stuck to a white wall, complete incompleteness.  A universe in 2D relief.  Structurally and practically speaking I would build this piece of work with a nod toward Gaudi. With added flourishes and knobbles, various bits of colour and decoration built with bits of discarded furniture and the like. In fact the whole thing would be based on found and broken bits of furniture, bits of buildings and the like.

The School Run.

Not what they said, but how they lived.

An image in banners.

I see banners as a viable contemporary art form / statement.                                                        

They address the question: How can painting exist in a contemporary world of digital expression? It’s a way of blending the old with the new. Making the initial heart felt comment then presenting it in a modern day to day context. After all, banners are everywhere. Their constructed material makes them durable, colourfast and reusable.  They are current, readable and universally acceptable. They can be erected and left up as long as useful, then, simply and easily taken down and safely stored for possible later use.

A picture of a picture on a billboard with people walking under it.

 

Am I bothered?

If you are reading this it is either by chance or you are one of a small number of people that I have invited in.
As it stands I’m not that bothered if anyone reads either of the Blog sites, I see them very much as ongoing projects to be ready in some sort of presentable format by Christmas or something like that.
I have put a number of images together on art-3000, but even so that is more of a collection of what I have done during my life rather than a selling format.
This lot is very much about who I am and even why I am, if you have the time to trawl through it. Very much "brain to fingers."
I am having awful problems with the computer at the moment and output is slow to say the least – this does in fact give me a chance to reflect on how important it is to have as many varied copies of my work as possible.
Again, this, at present is very tacked together, please don’t expect to find any sense of "continuos chronology".
Also the "followers" part doesn’t seem to be functioning, which also means that it is awkward leaving comments.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150224013601424.351810.707526423&l=8917fccbf5
link to facebook album "from the otherside"