From the streets to your space…
Profit-Driven Pricks (2025), Frank Riot
Artist and activist Frank Riot’s poster creations veer between subverting commercial ad.s; stained glass inspired works; Art Nouveau-esque creations; poetic, stark and withering text pieces; constructivist energies; bold graphic woodcut designs and more.
Whatever the style or medium deployed, Riot’s works pull a whip-smart and intense focus on subjects demanding scrutiny, attention and, most importantly, action. Human rights, climate crises, decriminalisation of sex workers, genocide, big tech broligarchy…
There’s zeal, righteous rage, diligently informed analysis but amazingly there’s also an energetic, seemingly unflagging persistence in presenting her arguments in the face of mis-informed, idiotic, even aggressive and ignorant opposition.
For example, on the occasion of being challenged during an Earth Day action by “someone who was not particularly a fan of climate protesters” Riot responded with her characteristic reason plus a degree of exemplary patience: “They’d perceived (falsely) from the press that activists might obstruct the [London] marathon and wanted to express concerns over climate activists being a violent public nuisance, telling me there was more important things to be worrying about – like homelessness (had some terrible news for them on the impacts of climate breakdown). Then [they] asked me what my carbon footprint was and how I’d like it if someone threw paint at my house?”
Riot further explains: “I did my best to talk cordially, despite my exasperation at people’s painful absorption of bad-faith media on the topic. It was tough because it drives me fucking nuts to witness the success of the fossil fuel industry’s long campaign, propped up by corporate media, to steer the onus away from an industry that has known for decades its product would eventually devastate life on earth.”
Along with the fervour, there’s a fierce intelligence attendant on Riot’s activism, visual and otherwise. But also, at root, a palpable care, concern and unselfish love for humankind. As corporate power is resurgent coupled with right-wing politics and prejudice appearing to move centre stage, Riot’s ongoing practice and her new iteration of the Profit-Driven Pricks (2025) poster seems tailor-made for our times.
The poster is now available in the shop HERE
On the Street
REBIRTH OF A NATION:
BEN TURNBULL X CANDIDATE Q
We’ve been watching an intriguing and hugely impressive art project that’s been brewing in America over recent months. And now it’s landed in the UK.
The attack on the Capitol, January. 6th 2021 – by Trump supporters seeking to disrupt Congress formalising Biden’s 2020 US election victory – led to more than a thousand people charged and imprisoned for federal offences. Back then anyone would be forgiven for thinking right wing American politics was on a back foot. Mired in controversy and criminal prosecutions very few imagined Trump would or could again rise to power. But reading the runes of US populism, the UK artist and longtime Americanophile Ben Turnbull sensed Trump’s MAGA campaign was far from defeated.
The Candidate (2022), Ben Turnbull
Turnbull created The Candidate (2022) collage three years ago. Featuring the rioter in horned headdress, furs and face paint, this artwork proved to be a record of real events, a rumination on political conspiracies and prescient harbinger of the resurrection and ultimate victory of right-wing populism in America and, it would appear, across the globe.
A detail of The Candidate appeared as a poster and displayed on the streets of New York. This was quickly followed up by another poster featuring a detail this time of a collage titled We Need To Talk About Timothy (2023) wherein a dark Superman is seen writhing in an electric chair. And who do we have to thank for these searing urban interventions? A clandestine figure known only as ‘Candidate Q’.
A third street poster featuring a detail Turnbull’s Magaworld (2023) collage was followed by the first full poster reproduction of Site-Seeing (2023) hitting the New York streets. A detail of Liberty Once Lost Is Lost Forever (2023) poster appeared and the above displays were supplemented with smaller posters asking ‘Who Is Q?’. There’s aloso stencils and a sticker of the Q Scream (2024) work that references both Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) and a Marvel Comics antihero character called Punisher.
1/6/21 (2024), Ben Turnbull
On the street
October last year saw the beginning of a significant visual gear change with colossal poster installations of (i) Magasound (2023) in Austin, Texas. (ii) Magabuck (2023) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, (iii) 1/6/21 (2024) loomed large in New York. It features the Lincoln Memorial statue, only here the 16th US president is sporting horns and there’s a bucket of popcorn sitting in his lap. It’s as if he’s settling into a front seat view at the unfolding debacle that is Trump’s America.
Next up, a street poster featuring the 1/6/21 (2024) image together with the phrase ‘Thus Always To Tyrants’ – meaning a bad but justified end will eventually befall tyrannical leaders – sprang up in London and other cities across the UK.
Turnbull has dubbed the entire Candidate Q series of artworks ‘Degenerate Pop’. Referring to the types of modern art the German Nazi Party castigated as ‘degenerate’ in the 1930s. And ‘Pop’, of course, reminds us of the artist’s fascination and deep engagement with film, comics and other aspects of American popular culture.
Visit candidateq.com to see the full Candidate Q series of artworks plus street images as they appeared on the street in USA and UK from May 2024 to February 2025
Another World is Possible (2024), Peter Kennard
It’s often noted that Kennard’s aesthetic owes a debt to anti-Nazi photomontagist John Heartfield, and the collages of Hannah Hoch. But the wit, brevity and directness of his work has surely been an inspiration too. It’s hard to imagine that the social, cultural and political critiques made by the likes of Banksy aren’t informed by the visual language that Kennard has developed and practiced over a lifetime. And beyond collage what’s often not recognised in considering this activist artist’s extensive body of work is how consummate a draughtsman he is. At the Whitechapel his series of charcoal portraits, forgotten faces, rendered on the stocks and shares pages of the Financial Times afford a haunting commentary on people the markets leave behind or, worse still, intentionally sacrifice at the altar of solely commercial imperatives.
The ‘Another World Is Possible’ poster for flyingleaps will often be seen on the streets paired with a second poster featuring a text by Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul
One clock, with missiles for the hour and minute hands, declares it’s past midnight, already too late to save the world from mutually assured destruction. There’s a second clock though, a second chance, one last chance perhaps? Here the minute hand on this larger dial is tethered with sash cord. Halted at five minutes to midnight, a human hand tugging at the taught rope holding us back on the brink of disaster but the likelihood of this homespun tactic working for very long is questionable. And if we needed reminding what’s at stake, the face of this second timepiece features our blue planet. Its marbling of swirling sky and seas surrounded by a black void represents so succinctly what a vulnerable state the earth and humanity are in.
Currently on show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery there’s a fifty-year retrospective or as the exhibition title has it, an ‘Archive of Dissent’. Kennard’s work time and time again distils concerned outrage at the arms trade, political malfeasance, needless poverty and suffering, institutional racism, media oligarchs and all forms of oppression and persecution that raw, neo-liberal market capitalism visits on an ever more debilitated planet. Gaia is besieged.
Everyone who purchases the new flyingleaps poster by Kennard will also receive the poem poster for free. ‘Another World Is Possible’ will be released as a signed edition of one hundred, priced at £50.00 with seventy-five percent of proceeds being donated to organisations supporting people affected by conflict.
Peter Kennard has nominated the Ajyal Foundation in particular to receive support from the sale of his ‘Another World is Possible’ poster. The foundation is an Oxford-based nonprofit organisation that develops and collaborates on the delivery of high quality, research-led education and mental welfare for children impacted by war, violence and displacement with a particular focus on Palestinians and refugees.
On the Street
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.’
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…
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.
