From the streets to your space…
JEREMY DELLER X FLYINGLEAPS 2024
Jeremy Deller’s ‘Thank God For Immigrants’ poster first appeared during an extended Covid lockdown in April 2020, reminding us of the stalwart efforts of immigrant key workers and through public sale of the signed artwork raising funds for Refugee Action and the Trussell Trust.
Now, in 2024, the artwork is back on the streets in various formats, appearing courtesy of creative outdoor communications bigshots BUILDHOLLYWOOD.
Understated in material terms, the life of street posters (and their sticker cousins) is usually short-lived, ephemeral, that’s partly the point. It’s a medium capable of responding to an issue, a matter of concern, quickly and directly. They don’t carry the freight of ‘fine art’ and they address diverse audiences because of this as well as their being displayed in the streets. Who can resist both the ethereal coloured ground and pithy plain-speaking of a poster that declares ‘Thank God for Immigrants’?
This signed, open edition artwork is available now to purchase in our shop. The size is 30×20 inches and it’s printed on 115gsm blue-backed billboard paper, priced at £50.00 (plus p&p).
All profits from the sale of this artwork will be split between two beneficiaries. First, for obvious reasons, we chose the Refugee Council. And from numerous smaller charities that need support we plumped for Revoke, a grassroots organisation advocating for the rights and care of displaced young people deprived of power or a voice. With Deller’s latest ‘Thank God For Immigrants’ re-release once again we can raise some much needed funds to support important causes.
Exampes of the Buildhollywood large format poster and digital national campaign
Both achingly apt metaphor and stomach-churning matter of fact, Jeremy Deller’s ‘We Have Been Swimming In Shit’ (2024) continues the artist’s rich vein of critical street poster interventions. As with his previous ‘Cronyism Is English For Corruption’ (2021) the first tranche of the open edition of Deller’s ‘Swimming’ poster was sold through the Art Car Boot Fair. It is now exclusively available as part of the continually growing archive of signed visual activist / artists’ poster prints for sale via flyingleaps.
As an artist Deller wants to rile people, get them thinking, to challenge how things stand and through a bringing together of disparate points of view and the people who hold them have a tangible social impact. The artists’ role in society is s/he’s “[A]lways a bit of a troublemaker. They fight with ideas and imagery […], of course, there’s artists who make beautiful things and that’s fine but that’s not where my focus is.’
ZAVIER ELLIS X FLYINGLEAPS
Deploying a rich visual language born of both subtle and brash, time-worn, abraded urban surfaces – distressed walls, scrawled marks, bleach and aerosol graffiti, garish signage, flyposting, material textures galore – artist and curator Zavier Ellis has created two new flyingleaps poster prints that foreshadow issues pertinent both globally and to the 4th of July UK election.
In Ellis’ Change (Change Now) (2024), against a black and white ground that resembles a scrubbed x-ray plate, we see two torus-like shapes. One saturated lipstick red O-ring sits atop another that’s Prussian blue. Scratched in the mottled pink and white maw of the red form, in lines that resemble marks made by a drypoint etching needle, or a compass dragged across flesh, is a symbol of eternity. At the centre of the blue form, the same painful fine linear mark-making spells out the word ‘NOW’. Scrolling top to bottom, in a heavy black candelabra type font we read ‘CHANGE’. Except never the whole word, letters are omitted or partially blotted out by raw swathes of paint.
A companion to the above work, titled Exodus (No War) (2024), repeats the overall distressed and distressing design but this time its dominant hues are black, white, green and red. The Palestinian flag’s colours are inspired by the thirteenth century Arab poet Safi a-Din al-Hili’s verse: White are our deeds, black are our battles, Green are our fields, red are our swords. This time ‘NO’ and ‘WAR’ are scraped into the mottled void at the centre of the coloured rings. And in the same heavy black but again intermittently visible lettering, the word ‘EXODUS’ tumbles through the composition. The work pulses with both ancient Israelites flight from Egypt and current forced migration out of Gaza.
The vying visual elements – scratched or other wisely compromised text, the bold gestural versus chance mark-making, screams of colour and iterative black, white and grey – all create a tense palimpsest, nothing is certain, everything is in constant flux. This is a visual manifestation of Ellis’ thematic concern, namely his ongoing, and uneasy investigation into the human race’s capacity to repeat history, and rarely in a good way. It’s work that reflects, and reflects on, contemporary antagonisms – cultural and political enmity, violent conflict, seismic societal shifts, social unrest – but reminds us these human blind spots, weaknesses and antagonisms are deeply embedded in us, both in terms time and human temperament.
Zavier Ellis posters on the Street…
Cat Phillipps – Trapped (2024)
Black ink bleeds across the blanched, pallid faces of MPs, Conservatives atop, Labour below, crowding round their respective leaders. Sunak and Starmer are stood at their dispatch boxes, each spouting their own dubious, mealy-mouthed cant in a bid to retain or gain power. And sandwiched between these two scrofulous assemblies? The word TRAPPED.
That’s us folks! Communities up and down the country who, in the artist Cat Phillipp’s words are, “Caught between two shitshows of self-serving power, no guiding principles, just the toxic leak of greed, and people left to survive a national landscape devastated by politics sleeping with corporate power.”
The time-honoured tradition of defacement being a valid mode of visual protest pertains to this latest flyingleaps poster by Phillipps. We’ve seen recently an escalation of toppled statues, vandalised ‘masterpieces’, graffitied monuments: all last-resort bids to be heard, to rail at and counter a politics that ignores or, worse still, blatantly patronises its voting public.
Corrupt and kaput, Sunak’s Tories thrash about in the death throes of ebbing influence. Meanwhile Labour under Starmer abandons its flagship green investment pledge, reneges on a promise to ensure that ‘public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders’ and has back peddled on scrapping the inhuman benefit cap that prevents parents from claiming welfare for more than two children. That’s out-and-out vandalism.
Trapped (2024) follows on from an earlier series of works where world leaders’ portraits are subjected to a similar partial scrub and tangled inky tarnishing. Phillipps was a professional photographic printer and is more than capable of producing a fine digital print. Here she’s disavowed the principles of museum quality printing. These unprincipled weasels don’t deserve such care. The artist elaborates on this aesthetic, “Fuck it. Fuck high end principles, fuck printing principles, fuck respecting any principles in the rendition of these subjects, these politicians, these men in suits. Print on pathetically thin plastics, let the inks from the machine dribble, leaking across the surface, breaking apart the forms of these people in suits, these people in power. Let these forms reveal the consequence of their actions, let them be presented to the audience for the toxic, corrupted, destructive entities that they are, no longer afforded the protective polish of their immaculate suits and outfits used to disguise their filthy rackets.”
Trapped on the Street…
Merny Wernz – Smooth Things Over
A painterly nod to the ushering in of Modernism? Would it be too much to suggest the particular shades of green deployed in our latest flyingleaps street poster recall the background foliage in Édouard Manet’s famed 1863 work Déjeuner sur l’herbe? Probably, yes.
Okay. Let’s try this… Do you have a green room at home or at work? Does it have a secondary colour thematic, say black? And maybe an accent or ‘pop’ of blood red? Do you like artworks whose subject is meticulously annotated? Does it matter to you whether that annotation affords fuck all help as to what the picture is about? If the answer to the above is, “What?!” then flyingleaps latest collaboration with Merny may just be the answer to all your 2024 interior decor needs.
Merny is a Bristol based artist, illustrator and muralist who is not averse to making work calling out criminals. Our latest street poster titled Smooth Things Over (2024) arguably tackles what is at first sight a less pressing problem: what to do when things are uneven? It’s an issue that presents itself in all shapes and sizes. There’s times when we accidentally rip off a fingernail and here the wise advice is to clip above the cuticle line and file very gently.
MAGDA ARCHER, Don’t Ask (2023)
Who wouldn’t welcome a brace of Magda Archer posters bringing this year to a close? Critical, mischievous, wit tinged with a world-weary despair. And if Archer’s cast of winsome creatures are world-weary, what hope the rest of us? Her ‘Don’t Ask’ (2023) features a couple of cute critters scampering past blue, wonky features of a city skyline, “How Bad Does It Get?” one asks. Hmmm.
Considering the state this country is in – NHS ‘death by a thousand cuts’; the cost-of-living rip-off; dire housing need; shilly-shally Tory eco policies and their ‘blame the stranger’ stance on immigration; the care system; scant mental health support… The list is daunting. Add to these domestic woes so many other tragic events, the utter abominations it seems humans persist in visiting on one another around the world, and you’d be forgiven for wanting to go full-on ostrich.
Archer’s images help us to peek between our fingers at the rottenness, while delivering stinging memos as to social injustice, personal foibles, systemic failure, etc., she also deploys pointed absurdity and singing colours and pithy language to make work that helps lighten the load of modern life.
MAGDA ARCHER, Otherwise (2023)
PLUS, we’re very pleased to announce flyingleaps has teamed up with UNCLE, the international paste-up crew, to super boost the street display of Archer’s second poster. ‘Otherwise’ (2023) doesn’t mince its message, a sweet Jack Russell Terrier sits with the CND logo – symbol of peace and dissent – in their mouth while the wraparound text reads, ‘WORLD PEACE IS COMING (otherwise we’re screwed).
Oppression and conflict stalk the face of the earth, born of religion, race, ethnicity, governance, ideology, politics, greed… All bitter antagonisms that have one thing in common, a mindset that perpetuates, creates, a bleak and binary cast of otherness. And with it a sense that those ‘others’ don’t need to be treated as fellow humans.
We all know a picture of an adorable pup with a symbolic doggie chew won’t save the world. The poster simply points out what’s blindingly obvious. There are already enough planet shattering problems that can, will only ever be solved via international cooperation.
ANTHONY BURHILL, You & Me & Us & We (2023)
A fresh rendition of Burrill’s ‘You & Me & Us & We’ (2023) artwork is a clarion call for more inclusive, community spirited social relations. As a street poster the work affords both consolation and inspiration. Whichever way passers-by cast their eyes across Burrill’s assemblage of bold pronouns and ampersands, the effect is a refreshing break from being cynically, garishly ‘implored’ or ‘shouted at’ by commercial adverts. In the face of personal and societal, local and worldly pressures, we all have moments when we say, ‘What is it I do? Is it worthwhile?’ Burrill’s answer, “I think you’ve just got to be brave and put work out there that you believe in. […] We’re all a work in progress, get conversations going, talk to as many people as possible, build relationships, bring people along with you.”
BUY POSTER
Dr.D, State (2023)
Dr.D has produced a typically adroit if harrowing new poster version of ‘State’ (2023). It points to the absurd, scandalous lack of affordable housing in this country. It’s a conviction he expressed earlier this year with a brilliant installation at Glastonbury but bears endless repetition. An ONS survey suggests that since records began the cost of private renting has seen the largest hike ever in the 12 months leading up to June 2023. It is predicted to rise even further in the near term. Social housing isn’t fairing much better with the main housing associations across the UK increasing rents by the maximum amounts allowed. And service charges aren’t covered by the same suggested 7% limit. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say housing policy in the UK is one big catastrophic, arguably criminal, fail.
VIEW THE ROYAL CORONATION COLLECTION HERE
ALL CORONATION POSTERS AVAILABLE IN THE SHOP
30”X20” posters (printed on 115gsm blue-back billposter paper) signed via an accompanying slip.
Price varies from £30 to £50 plus p&p
Dr.D aka Subvertiser
While the debate goes on as to whether flyposted and other oppositional art or visual activism has any direct effect in bringing about sociopolitical change, what it can do at its best is feed into the publics’ disposition.
Through strong imagery, cogent or quizzical text, humour, relatively speedy production and distribution, via its capacity to occupy anomalous spaces in the urban environment and through an imaginative, enacted engagement with matters of concern it can generate social media interest and help inform, even propel, opinion.
Dr. D’s targets include surveillance culture; the social effects of neoliberalism; commodification; mealy-mouthed and uncaring politicians; abuses of power in the media… Much more than bald sloganeering Dr. D’s imagery and text pieces often emerge, on reflection, as enigmatic meditations on twenty-first century existential angst.
Transgressing boundaries can reveal hidden rules. One could cite the precedents of the carnivalesque ‘telling truth to power’, vaudevillian comedy, Dada gestures in art but all of these, in a – it’s only a bunch of pucks/entertainers/artists – sense, operated in ‘sanctioned’ arenas. Dr. D’s contributions to the urban environment are rarely sanctioned and it’s this that contributes significantly to their traction and incisiveness.
The urban spectacle would have us believe that its over-riding character is, yes aspirational, but emphatically neutral and apolitical: that generally we’re going to be just fine if we carry on pretty much as we are. Dr. D’s pithy interventions, highlighting so many germane issues and employing such a variety of modes of address, repeatedly suggest otherwise.
