Mike Ballard -The Ultra Nomadic Def Smith Cycle

Edel Assanti Project Space
276 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 1BB

Thursday 24th March - Saturday 30th April 2011

All photos NoLionsInEngland except HowAboutNo where stated.
Video by Mark Gostick via GalaxyRays


Hanging a few canvasses and calling it a show isn’t Mike Ballard’s style. Ballard deals in whole room illusion experiences, multi-media sonic and video assaults, challenging conceptual celebrations of “taking without consent” and the intersection where delusional un-hinged jazz weirdoes meet dazzle painting. The whole lot flows through the fizzing circuits of Ballard’s brain and discharges via electrical components melded together by the mad boffin’s own hands.




The Ultra Nomadic experience starts with a curious framed circular patterned paper, various Ballard themes can be recognised in the concentric circle patterns but the most interesting orbit is the very out edge which has two semi circles of patterns of images, each image remarkably similar to its neighbour but different by some incremental detail like one of those flicker book animations, and the significance of this is revealed as later as you dive into the subterranean space.




First stop in the basement is a garden shed, a hut – no hiding that’s what it is. Inside set in the middle of the floor is a low level kinetic lightbox. The glossy black box is punctured by a circular screen, a beam sweeps out repeating circles picking out a viscous, boiling universal. Is it detecting the beginning or the end, or a continuous repeating loop between the two? Who knows, some say it marked out an organic intra-cellular voyage path picked out by a navigation system travelling within a mutilated, knifed body. You choose, it’s in the eye of the beholder this one.


The light arc shows the sweep of the light line in the photoexposure time


The Ultra Nomadic Def Smith Cycle is a bigger, better cosmic traveller, a maker of tangibles and intangibles (Smith as in smithy, forge) and What The River Brings, a poker phrase and also the oldest piece in the show dating back to about Ballard’s All Of Everything era, represents that voyage, the transformer nomad complete with suitcase sets off propelled by energy from the larger older version of himself.




There are two other minor photographic collage pieces hidden away in an almost un-noticed recess at the rear of the basement, Ballard’s view on these springs from his obsession with music. The images pay tribute through the representation of a mystical figure transformed with visible bizarre inner energies and wizardly properties, the whole referencing the originators of hip hop DJ Kool Herc and Grand Wizard Theodore. Once again Mr Ballard is responsible for me wasting entire minutes googling musical references an indie honky knows nothing of.




All of which doesn’t so much as define a backdrop as get completely blown away by the main feature of the show. You can’t miss it, its ambience is apparent as the lo fi one note synth-meets-stuck-oscilloscope-drone permeates your head from the moment you commence your descent at the top of the stairs. The source is a new installation but one that very clearly shows its relationship to the LaPlace Transforms sculpture which Graffoto patiently explained after the 2009 Long Arm Gallery Galaxy Rays show.




In this incarnation, an edition of the circular paper Ultra Nomadic Def Cycle drawing we found at the top of the stairs rotates on a platter with two turntable pick-ups. One tone arm has a scalpel blade resting on the rotating disc, this both creates and picks up the vibrations though unlike the earlier Laplace Transforms, the blade doesn’t cut into and destroy the disk. The signal passes through a vocoder which results in the sonic eminences we hear. A second tone arm holds a small camera and a light.




Compare the Ultra Nomad Def Smith Cycle above with the LaPlace Transforms from the 2009 show:


Mike Ballard - LaPlace Transform, Bristol 2009, photo: HowAboutNo


The frame rate of the camera, the rotational speed of the disc (78RPM)and the separation of the images around the paper have been critically tuned so that each successive image captured by the camera is dead centre in the frame. The resulting live “time lapse animation” is projected onto a screen built into the housing, Ballard christens the whole thing a sonotrope merging the idea of an image generator and a self noise generator in one device.




The sculpture is topped off with various minute figures signifying a mystical origin or source. The device radiates warmth and a riich lushness, coning you into supposing that the innards must be full of valves and “Elvis at Sun Studio” microphones




So much for describing the appearance, the experience however is nothing without the sound. This whining acoustic screech won’t leave you alone, you can try ignoring it but your subconscious always picks out the tones, some crazy inate Fourier analyser within your nervous system locks onto the frequencies then shifts to pick out some higher harmonic, then a different tone. The effect is as if the instrument is somehow being “played” with a gentle, slow tensioning and relaxing of the “angry flies trapped in a balloon” knob.




Trance like rapture would be a suitable response. If the images generated by the same disc as the sound aren’t perception enhancing enough, then this is probably exactly the sound track for a fairly bad trip on psychedelic grade As. The ambience needed sylph like naked females to slowly whirl around, arms aloft in complete immersion in the mood but none of them could be persuaded. What you really want is to witness! Thankfully, Mark Gostick produced this really slick video which Graffoto has nicked without consent.


from GalaxyRays by Mark Gostick

Interestingly, the inner images, a silhouette figure saluting the sun and some geometric patterns are being illuminated at 50Hz (probably) and are rotating at 78rpm and as you can see in the vid that image moves forward very slowly, a bit like the wagon wheel stroboscopic illusion on film.

This show is about transformations and trance, repetitions and electricians. Compared to past shows it is more about immersion than illusion. If you are a tall slender hippy chick with your own stash of hallucinogenics, please get in touch for the Graffoto guided tour.

A few other photos here.

Mike Ballard - Whose Coat Is That Jacket You're Wearing

Walker's Tailor
157 Robert St,
London, NW1 3QR
8 – 23 October 2010

All photos: nolionsinengland



"I woke with a bolt this morning. I had been dreaming about the night my jacket went missing. I could see it all in the dream. Where everything and everyone was in the pub. M and E were sat at the table as I got up to goto the loo. My jacket hooked over the back of the chair. As I enter the loo, M goes to the bar, and starts chatting to two girls, while he’s waiting to be served. Elliot goes over to join hime (sic) and help with the drinks. In that split second A guy moves over to our table, squeezing through the crowds, grabs my coat and is out through the door, all while I am still pissing. It is the night everything changed." MBSC:JC/200.19


Ever wondered what kind of kunt lurks in a bar with the objective of stealing your personal property? Well Mike Ballard has created an art spectacle proposing “I am that kind of cunt”.

Mike Ballard has spent ten years taking his twisted and silent revenge on an innocent(ish) society. His story is that ten years ago a prized jacket was stolen from him in a bar. His grief and rage prompted him to go on a larceny spree, stealing coats in revenge against that silent unknown threat, the bar dipper.


Walker's Tailor


Now Mike is contrite, seeking to right his wrongs and to exorcise the demons. “Whose Coat is that your jacket is wearing” is a display of 200 coats Ballard stole during this 10 year campaign of shame and evil. Turn up, you might find yours and if you do Ballard wants you to have it back.

There is a twist of course, you have to be able to rigorously prove it is yours. Ballard never stole to profit, or to clothe himself or even particularly to inflict trauma and pain on any individual victim, he stole as revenge. He would then photograph every jacket, note the date and record the contents of every pocket. So can you remember what packet of sweets and phone number written in lipstick was in the jacket when it got stolen? Ballard has it all catalogued on a secret indexed card database and you just have to get the description of those details right to get your coat back.

"Fashion Week is here again, and loads of after parties going off. There’s always some dizzy intern working on the coat check" MBSC:JC/200.125


The show itself takes place in a tiny shop, seemingly formerly a tailor’s workshop, A densely packed forest of jackets hang down from the ceiling, you have to stoop low to move around. Hanging from each jacket is a kind of dated looking luggage label, each of which has an entry from Ballard’s diary.




The first sensation that hits you entering this cramped space is the smell, a whiff of damp mustiness falling off a collection of wet weather gear that has been stored away for too long in a dark cupboard.

The art within this show has to be perceived as a number of layers. Firstly, the tight packing of the clothes obliges you to see the aggregation of the individual deeds, the woods rather than the trees. The artistic desire to create a shock is partially satisfied with this overwhelming sense of the total misery represented by all this stolen property.




Ballard has structured the experience so you can’t really take in the details of individual garments but what you can appreciate is the next macro level of detail in the experience, the individual; statements tagged to each jacket. These reveal the real art of the show in the detail of the personal confessions, the insights into the mind and bizarre logic of the serial coat purloiner. One thing missing from these written vignettes is any sense of shame or guilt. Quite often the message is one blaming the victim and the words lead us to conclude that Ballard has actually never stopped blaming himself for whatever lapse or buffoonery on his part led to the loss of his jacket.




Of course there is way more to this than merely running a lost property locker. What Mike Ballard is saying is let’s see how much you can take, how sanguine can you be about the notion that celebrating other peoples transient misery is art and here we zoom back out to the” big idea” level of his art. It certainly has a shock factor. It is verging on performance art, and a very cerebral performance at that. Ballard is putting himself in the firing line (metaphorically if not always literally, it may not actually be Mike Ballard in the space at any particular time!) for the moral indignation of the many and of course the special fury of the few should any victims actually find their coat among the Ballard trove. In terms of the personal danger Ballard might be placing himself in this is almost up there with the conceptual artist Chris Burden who had a mate shoot him in the arm for art in 1971.

Let’s not forget the risk of police scrutiny Ballard may attract. Stealing coats is theft, thieving on this scale goes beyond petty, who is to say that Ballard won’t find himself assisting the Met with their enquiries some time soon.

"Were the answers to be found in this long war of the will against the power of taboo? I doubt it so I took another and another and another" MBSC:JC/200.161


The added ingredients in this conceptual layer cake include the idea of catharsis through public humiliation and also the challenge to a Society which incarcerates as a punitive measure – can you forgive me? If you can’t forgive the reformed coat thief, then what’s the point in prisons because you will clearly never forgive nor forget anyone who has been through the “that’ll teach you not to do that again” system of correction through punishment.

The reaction to the announcement of this show has firmly focussed on the big concept, both public (via the internet, that lovely dis-intermediating tool for direct and un-censored expression) and press have homed in on the clash between the artistic concept of creating a shock spectacle out of stolen property and the personal risks taken by the artist in revealing this despicable history.




Ballard is unique in creating a art concept that exposes him to vilification and possibly violent retribution, it is fascinating to watch and interest provoked in his concept has gone world-wide. With this particular genie now out of the bottle it is possible to run with a whole new genre of “Look I’ve been naughty, me” concept art performances.

"Why put your coat in a locker then not pay the 20p to lock it. It doesn’t make sense for the sake of 20p. You will from now on though" MBSC:JC/200.92

To test the integrity of the back story, and to dispel the notion that even the facade with its tangentially linked and convenient name might be a sham fabricated by Ballard, with a little “due diligence” on the internet Graffoto tracked down a photo of Walkers Tailor in its genuine previous life.


photo from online business directory here

Open during the huge draw that is London’s Frieze art fair, this show is very close to the Frieze site, about 10 minutes walk from the Frieze entrance if you cut through Chester Terrace to Albany St, or about 20 minutes if you walk the long way round past Great Portland St tube station. This is likely to be more confrontational than anything you are likely to see in that tented world of the surreal unreal.

Graffoto has been a champion of Ballard’s art, his immersive room experiences and the quality of his canvas paintings and light boxes have always been exceptional. There is nothing on sale here which actually isn’t new for Ballard but still this show is a totally new kettle of aquatic lifeforms. It is a show big on concepts and big on risks. It’s a show designed to be controversial, intended to shock and bound to provoke extreme reactions. The crime of stealing coat is a very intimate one, the property is personal and in virtually every instance the victim and perpetrator are in the same room at the same time. Should anyone identify their jacket, respond to the provocation and give the artist a slap, we will be at the front of the queue pointing and saying “you got what you deserve”.

"B. just called me and said she had her handbag stolen. Shit!!!....what the fuck, I’m raging but what can I say. I hope she never finds out what I’ve been doing. " MBSC:JC/200.39

Mike Ballard - Shadows Of Tomorrow

Mike Ballard has done two previous illusion room shows. Amid the intense imagery fusing fine art collage with wild style forms and the synapse searing contrasts of the black and white colour scheme, Graffoto has never really done justice to those experiences. His latest illusion project is located in a private upstairs room above the Macbeth Pub, Hoxton St, London. This time Graffoto asked Mike Ballard to talk us through his latest wall, ceiling and floor illusion installation, then decided to throw away its own rulebook (though no one could find it so we think it got thrown away long ago) and let the artist speak direct to you in his own words.

Words: Mike Ballard with intro, endy bit and swear filter by Nolionsinengland
Photos: nolionsinengland except Mike Ballard where noted



“The title is The Shadows of Tomorrow. As in today is the shadow of tomorrow, and just sort of now...Present and stuff. Taken from the Madvillain tune 'shadows of tomorrow.


Photo: Mike Ballard


The character with the rays coming out of his eyes, that’s Vision, but in negative.



The first ceiling focal point is a man exploding, just opening to the universe,he looks a little bit like Jesus but its actually a silhouette of Quasar from the comic era. I thought I’d put him on the ceiling because its [like] opening up to the sky.




There are power figures like the wolf, the superhero, and the face looking backwards is a really graphic version of a character from Carravagio. Then it goes psychedelic with the doors leading out to the universe, mortality, double skulls. This looks like a turban but its a chest, I mirrored it there, on top of the cloak coming down then it starts going into a bit of wild style.




The other ceiling focal point is based on synchronised swimmers, I did this stop animation of this clock ticking round – I thought it would be a good centre piece,. The first focus is more of an explosion but this is more of a 60s trippy looking and round here, more false perspective type thing.




Down the other passage [along front of building] we get mystical again with this horse, a power figure and these dismembered bodies, is part of a sketch by Rubens, part of it is figurative, then the female superhero’s arm is going up and another superhero with a knife where the horse’s second leg would be and then it just flows of into style.




The fissure, the crack is the cosmos all just opening up, the clouds, the energies, the dust from the hooves from the horse, then a bit more planetary solar system stuff, and then..i just thought the girl looked right painted opposite. At first people didn’t see the girl, until I joined it up with the ceiling. Since I did the rest, the girl and the animals have become a bit more visible.




I like the dismembered limbs, just like the bits but I always like painting girls. Like the sorceress from the University of Arts All Of Everything work.




This is not so much an exhibition, i was commissioned by the pub to install all this painting, i am working on a lot more video and collage stuff for a show later on in the year which is more the direction i am on at the moment.

I just like to muck about with the perspective and the scale of things like the size of this girl compared to the horse, just throwing it in, it’s just a weird jumble of things but it has this energy, I’m really into the horses and the clouds from the hooves, energy, dynamic , battle things.



I’d say it took a week and a half solidly, the floor will get fucked up, that’s why we varnished it.

Next one after this, I might try different colours, red and white, blue and white.


Photo: Mike Ballard


The first Ballard room was installed at the Cept v. Mike Ballard in Dalston, the room was an irregular shape entered by going upstairs and down stairs and under half height barriers, think something like a children’s bouncy ball den but marginally more sinister. The second was The All Of Everything, a celebration of the life and demise of the University of The Arts, London which was the last show in the space before it was knocked down to make way for the new Cross London line.

Unlike the those two Ballard rooms, this one is likely to last. Check out upstairs at the Macbeth Public House, Hoxton Street, London. Ongoing!

Mike Ballard: The All Of Everything

The Art Gallery,
University Of The Arts, London
10 Dec 09 – Feb 2010


all photos: NoLionsInEngland and Howaboutno where stated


Two major solo shows, a couple of crew shows not to mention some shutter painting have already made 2009 a prolific year for Cept.


Bethnal Green Rd, 2009


Not to be outdone, Cept’s alter ego Mike Ballard has a major heavyweight solo show to see out the old year and also to see out an old building too. The location is the University Of The Arts, an educational establishment that will be demolished in February and whose imminent demise frames the challenge addressed by Ballard which is to celebrate the existence and conclusion of the gallery’s life cycle.

In 2008, Mike Ballard and Cept had a joint solo show in a ramshackle warren of a warehouse which featured an illusion room created by Cept.


Cept vs Mike Ballard, London 2008


First thought upon entering the large single storey hall of this show is that Mike Ballard has created a very similar illusion room. But there are several critical differences; the scale is much much larger, probably three to four times the floor area; the ceiling is a wild collage of black and white digital images rather than paint and there is none of Cept’s characteristic graff writing and almost none of the lichenstein-esque pop women.






The walls are dominated by about seven key images which relate to the themes of the show. In the corner furthest from the entrance to the room, a large hand points into the wall and an explosion erupts from the finger, starting time, the universe and bringing everything to life.




Existence is dominated by man’s desire to control time whilst living the simultaneous delusion that time is something the rolls out ahead of the now, the artist sees existence as being part of a continuum in which the past, the present and the future are all equally present, always have been and always will be. The illusion and delusion of mastery of time is symbolised by the hands grasping at a tilted pyramid. At the foot of the pyramid the initials MB are the only nod towards the artist’s identity.




Around the room Ballard brings the whole of creation at a broader cosmic scale into the room. Technology clashes with the ancient everywhere, a pyramid death mask with illuminated eyes sits above galaxy rays transmitting across printed circuit board links to the ever repeating circular motif “The end of the beginning, then beginning of the end”, reflecting the parlous state of the building as it sits on the developer’s death row. The eyes are actually peep holes through to a couple of televisions replaying excerpts from Sun-Ra’s rambling shambles of a blaxploitation space oddity movie “Space Is The Place”. Satellite dishes sit on pyramids covered in hieroglyphics created by Ballard but inspired by pre hip-hop New York gang symbology fused with more Sun Ra mystical “I come from Saturn me” runes.


The End Of The Beginning, The Beginning Of The End


A sonic message is relayed through hidden speakers behind the pyramid mask, the indistinct voice sounds urgent and insistent, you can’t escape the noise and you can’t ignore it, it is hard to make out the terse phrases “I know what I have witnessed and now it is your turn, prepare yourself for a journey of self discovery” .

Although there are no graffiti style letterings in the room, the floor contains a wild and wired spray of straight lines, ray paths and links between the principal images on the wall. The pattern breaks up in places into wild style links and connections, just the actual letters themselves aren’t there. Ballard has based this on NY legend Rammelzee’s Ikonoklast Panzerism manifesto with its idea of wild style lettering locked in battle with structured and formal Roman style lettering, leading to a cyclical deconstruction of letters as carriers of language through the form known as graffiti, the rejection of received forms for letters and anarchic destruction of the way society uses written communication. Which doubtless makes sense if you have fried your brain on dope for a few decades.


Space Is The Place


Weird corrugated patterns break up the floor and trick the eye into believing the flat floor is moulded into sharp shallow peaks and troughs, the patterns also reflect Ballard’s fondness for hip-hop and modern jazz. The trompe l’oeil effect is at its most powerful in the corners and where the eyes finds it hard at times to discern where the horizontal becomes the vertical and where floor meets wall. In this photo of the artist putting in hasty last minute touches, the eye easily persuades the brain that Ballard is hovering half-way up the wall.


What floor? Photo HowAboutNo


In Cept’s Dalston illusion room the pillars in the space formed geysers of emulsion linking the patterns on the floor and the ceiling. In this rendition by Ballard, the stark black and white patterns crash to an abrupt halt against a massive paste up covering every square inch of the ceiling. The collage image fuses the ancient with the modern again, Michelangelo’s David is given an MF Doom mask, Afrika Bambaataa fuses with classical cherubs sitting alongside graffed subway trains and images of spray painters.





The point of the ceiling is really to draw eyes up to the sky and to subscribe to the belief that there is something out there, the whole idea of everything on this planet and within this space is watched and destinies such as the fate of this room are possibly under the control of greater forces than we comprehend.


Guardians Of The Galaxy


The task of pasting the enormous paper to the ceiling was made immensely complicated by light fittings, fire safety equipment and a bizarrely random mix of different height beams, so nip and tuck compromises were required to achieve the correct alignment of certain critical elements such as the mirror image subway trains.

Cept’s graff heritage is referenced in one small area and that is an astonishingly deceptive perspective piece which captures a trackside cutting leading to a train tunnel where the young Cept first honed his skills as a spraycan graffiti writer, one of Ballard’s women weeps for Cept, we don’t know why.




There aren’t any paintings hung in the illusion room but in the foyer are just three small edition prints fitting with the themes explored in the show, including a digital print of the original image pasted to the ceiling. The image is too large to absorb in a single sweep in the room and too complicated to be condensed to the small scale of the print.


The All Of Everything ceiling image


Ballard has taken on the schizophrenia of a space which is simultaneously a destination as a gallery yet a transit passageway for people using the space as a throughfare to the many doors, he also conquers the notion of the building in transition between its current manifestation as a gallery and its immediate future as a pile of rubble then subsequent re-birth. We are lucky that someone with Ballard’s skill, imagination and generally intellectual weirdness has been given the use and total abuse of this space at this particular resonant point in its life cycle.




The show makes a huge statement, the all of everything, everything from beginning of time to the end, from floor to ceiling, top to bottom and everything in the whole of time and space, Mike Ballard lays it all out in the context of the life cycle of this building and it only needs two colours. Mike Ballard sets out the all of everything in black and white.

The space is amazingly photogenic, see more here [later today]. For enlightenment and reference, check out Cept vs Mike Ballard here and reviews of Cepts 2009 Galaxy Rays show in Bristol and The Frozen Explosion show at the Writer’s Bench in London

Cept v. Mike Ballard - One Artist's Group Show

30 Hertford Road
Dalston, London

22 Nov - 30 Nov 2008

Photos: NoLionsInEngland except where stated

A natural separation in graffiti culture requires art fags admiring street art to take their asymmetric haircuts and pink glassless glasses to Shoreditch, while the hard core graff guys get their secret society writer-shall-write-only-for-writer thing up in the provinces, like Hackney, Hounslow and Dalston. One person who metaphorically lives within both worlds is Cept. Actually Cept exists across far more than two worlds. There’s the Cept who has been ruling the streets for over 20 years tagging and writing and generally getting up with TRP crew.



Then there’s the Cept who takes spray can art to the streets



There’s also the Cept who transfers his street persona to canvasses and gallery walls, more of that soon. Finally there’s Mike Ballard, the St Martins graduate artist who inhabits Cept’s body and surfaces from time to time to produce dark and jumbled paintings. Or is it the other way round?


photo: HowAboutNo

To find all these Cepts means orienteering to a labyrinthine and rickety lockup workshop in a dimly lit and nondescript warren of utilitarian housing estate streets behind Kingsland Road. Bang loudly on the corrugated shutter with a number 30 on it!

The ground floor space looks like an artist’s store room, heavy oil paintings are mounted high on coarse brick walls, an illuminated cocktail light box is pushed into a corner, in small dead-end cubicles small screens show looping scratchy multimedia film clips while all around are many relics and wall daubings of former occupants. The roughness of the room mirrors the artist’s determined avoidance of pretentious frippery, a white cube this ain’t.


photo: HowAboutNo

Since impressionism, artists have been preoccupied with battling against the perceived notion of an accepted art, the grand art of landscapes and religon which is displayed to show good taste, worthy subjects and high technique. Cept sees the acceptance of graffiti and its entry into galleries alongside “traditional” art as a battle won, see the diagonal flow of the all conquering graffiti writers coming off the streets in the top right overwhelming the cherubs and fine art of the establishment towards the bottom left.


Throwing The House Out Of The Window

A particular theme is an illustratorly concentration on karma sutra imagery, present in a tryptich of digital prints as well as a series of paste-ups papering the stairway to the upper floor where Cept’s pop art comic aesthetic is displayed. Such images might be found in HowAboutNo's flickr. The perve.

Borrowing images from comics and most obviously from pop art’s high priest Lichtenstein, Cept tells a romantic tale involving the anti hero, a super villain, lets call him Cept for convenience and a pure pop 1950’s ideal of feminine beauty, a girl who admires Cept the super villain both as a concept and as physical specimen. Her love is possibly tragic and un-requited, she cossets a Cept graffiti tag to her cheeks as nowadays the love for graffiti has come in from the cold.


Remember When Graffiti Was Hated (photo: HowAboutNo

Her intrigue with graffiti doesn’t subjugate her need for a man who possesses old fashioned qualities of infallibility, dependability and heroism. She dotes on the super villain but recognises and indeed admires the flaws in his character, awakening within her a fascination for his desire for possession of public space.


How….Why? (photo: HowAboutNo)

Meanwhile Cept the Super Villain is seemingly going through a crisis, split by his comic hero superpowers and the conflicting demands of the old fashioned modern romantic. So he still leaps unscathed from unexplained explosions,


If It Kills Me (photo: HowAboutNo)

he coldly wields control over others’ destinies at the press of a button,


Mr Freeze (photo: HowAboutNo)

and un-swervingly faithful to his inner criminal, he gets his mark up on society’s walls


Letterman

Privately however, angst nags at him, he senses the futility in endlessly repeating his super villain antics and where we find the super villain away from the women and the heroic deeds, we find canvasses depicting pain, despair and an inner tension.


Tough Love (photo: HowAboutNo)


He Who Was Nothing – Is Nothing Once More (photo: HowAboutNo)

Cept showcases many more themes and styles apart from the comic hero imagery. He blends his skillz with the letter into his pop art imagery to greatest effect in this sharp almost art nouveau styled goddess, tresses of hair cascade down forming twisting into Cept’s letters.


Stripes

Cept frequently likes to play with concealed images, where possibly random illustrations only reveal the true subject through some chance and close scrutiny.


photo: HowAboutNo

Descending down a second set of great fire of London era wooden stairs, which look like they ought to lead to a den of gin-sozzled, brawling women and opium wrecks, we stoop under a barrier blocking the top half of a doorway and emerge into the highlight of the show. A truly astonishing stark and punchy two-tone walls, floor and ceiling painted room of visual illusion and eyeball defeating trickery..


Cept Room (photo: HowAboutNo)

Your eyes are overwhelmed by the intensity of the contrasting lines, swirls, shapes and objects. Cept creates perspective, plays with it again for fun and creates an illusion of corridors, holes, seascapes blending into room interiors and a selection of characteristic Cept comic book imagery. The floor has wave ripples lapping up to strongly patterned venetian tiled floor, whilst in other parts a series of painted steps disappear down into a painted manhole sinking into the earth’s core.



Two roof columns create fountains of paint erupting from the floor, surging outwards across the ceiling before breaking against the walls. The doting beauty gazes fondly at Cept’s tag, yet nearby the super villain lies out of sight, drained, jaded and semi-comatose in the shallow waters lapping up over his name.



A series of painted steps across the floor leads to a trompe l’oeil image of a cufflinked hand at the end of a corridor clutching the letter C.



Using a deconstructed graff writing form in which the structure of the letters has been totally discarded to leave a residue of wild style elements, the painted structure breaks up into almost abstract swirls, dots and moiré fringes only to reform into regular geometric patterns.


photo: HowAboutNo

It is un-avoidable that cynics will compare this room with D*Face’s dis-orientation room at the BRP Apopcalypse Now show last month but whilst that created a Keith Haring tribute using D*Dog wings and eyes, this Cept installation uses non repeating Cept imagery with not a single line or curve repeated anywhere. All of this was created single-handedly by Cept – no interned paint chuckers here – and took three weeks having been conceived before the D*Face show, though Cept confesses to a sinking heart upon entering the D*Face show and realising the extent of convergence with his work.


photo: HowAboutNo

A curiosity worth mentioning is that from a previous use, apparently the walls of the installation room have a Mode 2 mural directly on the brick, Cept has clad the wall with boards to leave the Mode 2 beneath intact. Respect.

It is worth whizzing up to Dalston just to be overwhelmed by one of the most intense visual experiences this year and one of the most satisfyingly staged shows (we do like our spaces rank and grubby). Bang loudly on that shutter door, but do it fast as the space is only open to the public until Sunday 30th, excluding Wednesday and Friday. Bugger it, check with Stella Dor before travelling!

Taking pictures in such challenging light without safety harness and hard hat contravenes all photographic health and safety regs, so hats off to HowAboutNo – check his pics here