Street Sculpture

RESEARCH INTO STREET SCULPTURES IN PREPERATION FOR SCULPTURE WORKSHOP

Street art is not only limited to stencils and wheatpaste, and many examples of street sculpture play on the same concepts of intervention and participation as their painterly counterpart. Using sculpture cleverly on an urban canvas can produce even more effective results than 2D works. 3D pieces are to break the fourth wall between image and viewer, as muralism forces itself into the view of the public, street sculpture forces itself into the public's personal space. 

Such as the work of Parisian artist Gregos, who took the typical idea of creating ones fame through street art very literally by literally creating lots of casts of his face in a variety of poses, at first he alone stuck them up in a variety of colour schemes yet before long he began to send them around the world for people to paint and stuck up internationally. To this day there are over 1000. By using his real face in the casting process his pieces have a hauntingly realistic quality, and appear restrained, allowed to manifest only in the briefest sense. 

Bordalo II uses mechanical scrap and found objects to create a relief sculpture and then paints over top to add tone. By overlaying complex shapes and objects he is able to create texture and give the sense of tactile depth and form. Like collage on a grandiose scale, Bordalo's work plays on a childlike sense of construction, as from afar the image appear as a whole yet upon closer inspection a wheel alloy can be spotted jutting out next to a halved car bonnet, and the origins of the work begin to become clear. The fact that the audience can identify with the original materials in another life explores the possibilities of material, not unlike how we worked in out OBJECT workshop.

Will Coles is an Australian sculpture who plays with familiarity and iconography to challenge perception in the public domain. By casting well known objects out of a non traditional material and making small changes to their form he is able to hijack our materialistic natures and subvert expectations. In "Consume" he commentaries how when buying high fashion brands, genuine or fake, it is an aspiration to the lifestyle it represents, be it an accurate one or otherwise. To do this he creates a golden quilted Chanel handbag which appears luxurious and soft to the eye, but is cold hard concrete to the touch. 

There is also another piece which sticks out to me as it covers themes which relate to my own practice. (see below) Relating to the current period of extinction plaguing the world's bee population. By applying narrative and character to the bee's plight, Coles' is able to challenge and provoke the viewer, making them realise the graveness of the situation and forcing them to consider exactly who would be effected in the event of their complete disappearance. It's shape and colour reference the informative blue plaques which mark places of historical interest in both the UK and Australia, satirising them and suggesting that the untimely death of our main pollinators could be one of the most prominent (and detrimental) historical developments of them all.

Finally, the work of Ronzo is typically 2D and cartoon-ish in appearance, however he is also well known for his sculptural works and interventions. "Crunchy", his pink 'credit crunch monster' was unveiled in 2009 as a tongue-in-cheek mascot of the financial crisis and still sits proudly as one of Brick Lane's most iconic and memorable pieces of art. As part of this piece he too mocked the blue plaque scheme, creating one of his own nature especially for Crunchy. (shown below) 

He also uses the everday material of cement in his casting, like Will Coles, effective not only because of it's humbleness but also because of it's ability to blend in to it's surroundings and be both subtle and subversive.

One of his most effective uses of concrete is in his parody of the City of London crest, cast with two lizard cherubs in snapback caps holding the shield and the motto "Lord help us!" inscribed in Latin. Because of his use of concrete the crest appears built into the very architecture of the wall itself, and lends a pseudo-official quality to the piece.  

  

The size and subtlety of placement is also one of it's highly successful factors, hidden above head height in plain sight, at about 30cm wide it sits above London's streets like a little private joke to the world, with only the observant able to appreciate the punchline.

This is crest is one of several examples of relief sculpture created by Ronzo, the largest and most ambitious of which is his large scale "Skater-Saurus", a large wall installation designed to look like an archaeological dig revealing a fossilised dinosaur with some very modern accessories. This is one of my personal favourite pieces from him because of the way it captures humour and uses the space so effectively. 

The way he melds the real world with boggle-eyed, spike toothed characters of his own creation is comparable to CGI beings, superimposed onto our grey, bleak cities with their bright colours, exaggerated features and satirical humour which doesn't take life too seriously. In the rushed setting of London, the mood he spreads is a welcome break and reminds us to enjoy the lighter things.