From the streets to your space…
DONT FRET
The old joke again… You wait for ages and then three come along at once! Only this time it’s FOUR new posters that are hitting the streets for flyingleaps.
It’s a real treat to share news that DONT FRET – the phenomenal visual chronicler of Chicago street life (and much more) – has contributed a cluster of fresh images to the flyingleaps artists’ poster project. DONT FRET is renowned for making witty and thoughtful paste-up interventions in his home city and across the world.
Signature DONT FRET works typically celebrate characterful figures and scenes the artist has witnessed in the street. Recreating both long forgotten and current peoples, incidents, passing cars, shop fronts and vendors with figurative paste-ups. DONT FRET’s dialogue with the urban environment and its vividly rendered inhabitants afford a rich commentary and critical reflection on everyday people and situations.
Another string to the artist’s bow are his hand painted text based posters that shrewdly, wittily nail existential angst. The first work by DONT FRET we spotted in London a decade or so ago struck home with gut wrenching precision… YOUR OPTIONS INCLUDE: BECOMING YOUR FATHER / JOINING THE ARMY / MAKING CONCEPTUAL ART / DYING ALONE IN THE WOODS.
And then there’s DONT FRET’S poster works that combine image and text, they’re dramas in miniature. One favourite – viewable on the Brooklyn Street Art site – features a raucous red, yellow and blue plumed parrot alongside a withering caption: ‘POLLY SAW YOU COMMIT ADULTERY’. A palpable tension radiates off this work. As we know, parrots can be talkative creatures. And so, amusingly, the less than moot suggestion is, your secrets are never safe.
DONT FRET’s flyingleaps collaboration posters are typically droll: In Hiding (2022) we see a face, well, a pair of eyes and nose peeping over a murky green wall. The text reads, ‘WHAT ARE YOU HIDING FROM? I AM HIDING FROM MYSELF.’ In Fly (2022) a black, smudgy airborne critter is bobbling towards its inevitable extermination accompanied by the forlorn caption, ‘I KNOW IT WILL KILL ME BUT I CAN’T RESIST IT…’. Most of us have been there! The Answers (2022) deftly critiques the baleful state of ‘me first’ thinking, a chronic inability to see beyond a partisan politics and self-interest.
And across the pond – in a collaboration with wheat paste champions UNCLE – we were chuffed to see DONT FRET’s Smiley (2022) appear in the Big Apple. The ubiquitous yellow face, the black smiley eyes and swooping grin is a pictorial trope that might at a glance be said to seed New York streets with joy. Then we’re bought back to reality reading the quavering hand painted text: WHAT IS HE SO GODDAMN HAPPY ABOUT?? This mega paste-up appeared just as the U.S. mid-term election results came in: Trumpty Dumpty was hobbled but as DONT FRET’s poster makes plain there’s still not a great deal to smile about.
So, whether you’re in cities across the UK or stateside in the Big Apple keep an eye out for DONT FRET’s socially engaged, distinctive, ironic and witty works appearing on a wall near you. All four 30X20 inch poster prints by DONT FRET are available from our website.
DONT FRET on the street – click on an image to enlarge
London and New York
Bristol
NEW MAGDA ARCHER POSTCARD BOX SET
Since 2017 when we pasted up Archer’s first flyingleaps street poster – POST BREXIT U.K. It’s Kinda Like Heaven! – her wry wit together with a rich, kitsch and painterly indignation have lined our streets with no less than eight much admired works. And now she’s done another. It’s a beauty. This Isn’t How I Thought It Would Be (2022) features a glowing bright red wobbly jelly on a pretty plate: so far, so good. But the classic Victorian afters sits amid a battleship grey ground that swirls nebulously around the toothsome dessert. The quavering text accentuates a profound feeling of existential angst. It’s been years since her first poster – a lot has happened, not much of it great– but the small print thereon still pertains re. the ‘Heavenly’ state of the post Brexit U.K. ‘Not really of course, it’s actually gonna be what they used to call a bleedin’ mess.’
The good news is that now there’s nine of Archer’s artworks we can produce our third postcard box set consisting of all her vibrantly acerbic imagery to date, plus a 10th card showing Archer’s flyingleaps collaboration posters on the streets.
The good news is that now there’s nine of Archer’s artworks we can produce our third postcard box set consisting of all her vibrantly acerbic imagery to date, plus a 10th card showing Archer’s flyingleaps collaboration posters on the streets.
AVAILABLE IN THE SHOP NOW
A QUICK REVIEW OF 2022
On reflection it’s been a pretty good year. It was so great to meet people in the flesh again. First at Jealous Gallery’s BEAUTY IS IN THE STREET show in Shoreditch and again at Jealous North. Then there was the marvellous ART CAR BOOT FAIR in King’s Cross. And while we there Zoe from THE OTHER ART FAIR popped by for a chat and that ended up with flyingleaps installing a 60-metre-long public facing display of posters from our archive (plus a swanky booth) at the 2022 fair in June. There’s been a bit of street art (actually street photography) related writing and talking for Nuart. The talks in Aberdeen and Dalston are long gone but the text is still available in their current journal if anyone’s interested. And, as mentioned above, it was great to collaborate with the wheat pasting champions UNCLE and get work up on the streets of New York. Special thanks to all the collaborating artists past and present. Plus we hugely appreciate all the kind folk who’ve bought artists’ posters from us, it helps to keep the show on road. Stay well. All best for the Xmas break and HNY 2023.
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All posters printed in 2021 are limited editions of 100 – prior to that they are editions of 300. All are 30×20 inch.
(apart from More That Unites Us (2017) and Agitate In Memoriam (2018) which were limited to a run of 100)
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.
