From
Lifelounge's Dirty Edition...
AF: What’s the D*Face back-story?
D*Face: I’m a born and bred Londoner. I grew up, went to school and art college in London and it’s where I’ve always lived.
I skated and doodled my way through school, failing all my exams due to my interest in skateboarding, cartoons and graffiti. Somehow I managed to get on a course to study design and illustration at a London college.
I can’t tell you anymore than that as I’m part of a high security government project and I’m sworn to secrecy. I’ll be able to divulge the nature of the project in 25 years time when it’s been declassified.
AF: What/who inspired you to pick up your first spray can?
D*Face: I guess the thread would run back to being bought the books Subway Art and Spray Can Art as a kid. Those books acted as eye candy to a visually starving kid. That pretty much paved my life from there on in; graffiti, skateboarding and cartoons are the key elements that directed my life.
Skateboarding and graffiti both teach you to look at the environment around you differently. As a skateboarder you’re looking for a bank or handrail as street furniture to skate, something that essentially wasn’t intended for that purpose. With urban art you’re looking around to see where to put up work. What is a plain wall to the passing public becomes a blank canvas to you. You begin to see and not just look.
So I guess the inspiration isn’t one individual, but all the names that used to paint the tracksides I’d travel past on my journeys around London as a kid. I don’t consider myself a graffiti artist; using spray paint is just one medium that I use. I’d say that I was as inspired by the artwork of Jim Philips, which graced the Santa Cruz skateboards I’d skate, as I was anyone. I think the first thing I picked up was a crayon and drew on my Mum’s wall aged seven. Spray paint didn’t come into it till a few years later!
AF: You appropriate icons and symbols in your work – can you explain some of the reccurring symbols you use and why?
D*Face: I try to provoke the viewer into questioning my work and their relation to it. If it’s in the street it can be as simple as using a character repetitively so people begin to question who put it there and why. It starts to make people question their surroundings and the idea of ownership.
By placing something illegally in the public domain, people immediately have a certain mindset and perception of that work, it’s a political statement even if the message isn’t political.
Advertising is more invasive, and often less considered, yet most people take this for granted and never question its presence and effect. I like to see my work as subversive intermissions from the media-saturated world that we live in. We’re constantly being fed images and information in relation to ‘improving’ our lives; I aim to get people to question their relationship with the work, and therefore create a visual dialogue.
I try and make the work I produce for ‘shows’ or on canvass provoke a reaction. Generally speaking it’s hard to maintain the impact you get with work in the streets when it’s transferred into a gallery, so I try to regain some of this impact and reaction by making the works more thought provoking, uncomfortable or downright ridiculous!
The appropriation of icons and symbols is not only a literal interpretation of the act of ‘defacing’, but it also gives instant dialogue between the viewers’ associations with those icons or symbols, and what they can or have come to represent. The What Wars Are For peace-symbol is a good example of appropriation; taking brand logos that have clear motives and language, combining them into a symbol that has come to represent ‘peace’ and producing a public piece of work illegally that articulated my feelings of the American invasion of Iraq and who prospers in war.AF: What expectations do you have of yourself as an artist?
D*Face: I’m pretty hard on myself; I’m critical of what I do. I just try to push what I’m doing and continue to take my work forward. That includes developing techniques, both old and new, and also learning new methods. I’m pretty militant and don’t stop and think ‘oh that was good, now time to chill’, I find it hard to stop. As I’m working on pieces for either a show or the street, new ideas are being spun from those, so there’s always the next scheme, the next project, the next show.
It can be pretty frustrating for those who are close to me.
AF: How does your attitude differ between creating art for a gallery compared with art on the street?
D*Face: The point of putting work in the street is that it doesn’t attract one type of person. The idea of placing work in the public domain, for me, is to try and interact with as many people as possible, from varied walks of life. I never went out to try and appeal to anyone; it was a pretty selfish act, I was just doing it for my own amusement. If anyone else saw it or paid attention to it, well, that was a bonus.
Producing work in the street has different obstacles that go with it. I like my street pieces to be really simple – a whack between the eyes. With gallery works, because you have the ability to interact with the viewer in a different way, you can play with dialogue.
I think my attitude remains the same to challenge the viewer. What might at first seem sickly sweet or obvious has an underlying meaning that might be a little more uncomfortable to stomach.
AF: Tell us a little about your gallery, StolenSpace – why you started it and what the concept is behind it?
D*Face: StolenSpace has been around now since 1999. Not in the physical gallery sense as it is now, but as an idea and experiment. It’s been a long path to get it to where it is now. It evolved from ideas and sideline projects into what was the Outside Institute (which was London’s first ‘urban art gallery’). We looked East and based ourselves in The Old Truman Brewery, East London and whilst we have a permanent gallery space that holds shows once a month, we also have access to spaces within the The Old Truman Brewery. This allows us to hold pop-up shows when we need an alternative space that suits the artists’ work more appropriately. It’s like having a chameleon gallery.
For example, we held Shepard Fairey’s first London solo show in 2007 in a 20 thousand square foot warehouse. For the duration of that show we were the largest private gallery in London.
The idea of StolenSpace isn’t to show only ‘urban art’, but to show incredibly talented artists, be that known names or unknowns. If we think they’re doing something unique that fits with the thinking of StolenSpace, then we try to show them. We exhibit the artwork of a genre yet defined; from tattoo artist, illustrators, skateboard graphics to graffiti artists.
AF: You said in an interview with Faecal Face that D*Face has “no specific goal, conclusion or end, it merely serves to test cause and reaction”. What have been some interesting reactions to your work?
I said that? Nice. I must have been drunk and making sense for a change! The comments or reactions vary from the sublime to the ridiculous. From hookers in Berlin threatening to call the police to people saying the stickers they see are their guardian angels.
AF: Has the increase in street art changed the way you feel about or approach your own art?
D*Face: I’m still doing me. The more street artists that I see trying to be Banksy or Blek, the more I try to make the stencils I do look less like stencils.
The goals are the same now as they were when I started: get work up and seen, the more and varied the audience the better, the longer the work lasts, better still. I just try to break peoples’ perceptions of what they think my work and street art is about and the directions it can go.
AF: What shows or projects have you got coming up?
D*Face: I’ve got a bunch of things lined up well into 2010: a solo show at Jonathan Levine Gallery New York in 2009, a solo show/retrospective print show in South Africa 2009, I’m working with an agent in Japan on a bunch of really interesting potential projects and I also have a solo show in LA scheduled for 2010.
Street wise I’ve got my eye on a bunch of billboards I’m going to reclaim. I’m also going to start the long task of learning to sculpt wood.
AF: Any parting words for us?
D*Face: The streets are yours. Go take them.