Steven Shearer - 'Poem for Venice'

Steven Shearer - 'Poem for Venice'

2011, Venice Biennale 

Shearers nine meter high billboard was placed just out side of the Canadian Pavilion for this years Venice Biennale. The monumental poem written by Shearer draws its vocabulary from Black Metal music lyrics and weaves darkly visceral images of pain and ungodliness.

  The shed like structure acted as an entrance way to the pavilion where Shearer displayed a series of expressionaistic pastel drawings paintings of memebers of Black Meal bands.  

"Shearer's practice, which encompasses photographic displays, drawings and paintings, lies somewhere between the anthropological study and the obsessive archival trawl. His soft pastel renderings and collage assemblages of amateur images culled from the internet transform the would-be tough image of male metalheads into a delicate, quietly evocative ephebic melancholia. The classic conte-crayon-like earthy, oversaturated palette he employs in many of these portraits don a kind of antique art-school life drawing model glow and expressionistic framework (the fluid lines of, say, Toulouse-Lautrec's backstage homages or Munch's anxious compositions might come to mind) to his anonymous, beautifully tressed characters, whose often averted gaze emphasises their objectification as well as their own absorbed self-possession."

 -  Lupe Nunez-Fernandez. “Steven Shearer at Ikon, Birmingham.” Saatchi Gallery. 2007-05-29.

Mark Titchner - I We It

From the series I We It

Mark Titchner 2004

Mark Titchner's I We It was commissioned by Transport For London's Art On The Underground program and exhibited at Gloucester Road Tube Station in 2004. In a space usually occupied by advertising stood Titchner's rousing banners, bearing the quasi-utopian language of corporate mission statements.

Formally styled to resemble trade-union banners and inspired by an array of culutural references including digital design, psychedelic poster design, baroque religious art and the decorative style of Victorian socialist/industrialist William Morris, the banners at once shout out with a revolutionary spirit and point towards ideals and beliefs co-opted by global capitalism.



Grayson Perry - The Walthamstow Tapestry

Grayson Perry - The Wathamstow Tapestry,  2009

1500x300cm, Stitched fabric.

This vast tapestry was designed to fill the entire wall of a wall at the Victoria Miro Gallery (London). Its 15 Meters length depicts modern life; from a bloody birth at one end through the seven ages of man to eventually death on the other.  Scattered with hundreds of detailed characters playing out various actions of every day life the Tapestry is also punctured by a multitude of brand names. Stripped of their corresponding logos and identity the brand names become an exploration into the emotional response and our  quasi-religious relationship towards consumerism. 

Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane - Folk Archive

Ed Hall's banner for Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane's Folk Archive

The Folk Archive is an ongoing project that seeks to catalogue contemporary practices across the UK that could be considered to be examples of present day folk art; examples of work which are clearly artistic in their intent and their outcome, though which do not fall under the banner of what s normally considered 'caontemporary art', 'fine art' or 'high art'.

These examples range from protest banners, such as the work of Ed Hall, above, to works made by prisoners, to fair ground sign writing and car modification, taking in a whole host of traditional pass times and festivals  along the way - tar barrel rolling and gurning, below, for example.

An online version of the archive exists here.