exhibition

BOOBY TRAP,

25.Jan.08 - 16.Feb.08
Mon-Sat 11-7

The Leonard Street Gallery
73A Leonard Street
London EC2A 4QS
020 7033 9977
info@tlsg.co.uk
www.tlsg.co.uk
Tube Old Street, Liverpool Street, Shoreditch / Hoxton

Leonard Street Gallery is pleased to present Brooklyn-based street artist BAST, along with fellow New York artist Judith Supine featured in the Project Room, in our upcoming exhibition BOOBY TRAP, opening 24 January 2008.

BAST combines the varied yet complimentary elements of pop-culture, political sarcasm, and a pinch of the Anarchist Punk movement with mixed media collage and silkscreen techniques to create boldly stylised and somewhat gritty images. His work appropriates this medley to convey his own interpretations of American life. Guns, grenades and Molotov cocktails are often waiting to be unleashed by a host of Disney and Warner Brothers' characters that use their weapons as carelessly as kids use water balloons, often asking the question, "What if cartoon characters ruled the world?"

BAST's work has remained a significant part of the urban landscapes of New York and Europe for the past 10 years, and has been increasingly seen wheat-pasted throughout many other international cities such as Berlin, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. BOOBY TRAP will feature billboard-style installations and an array of other new works by the artist.

In a slightly similar vein, Judith Supine arranges magazine cut outs and photographic images into colourful and strikingly cohesive large-scale assemblages. Supine's arresting street art is obsessed with garish, neon - coloured characters that live among us - collages of big lips and staring eyes-on industrial doors and abandoned walls throughout lower Manhattan and London.

Supine uses these found images and texts to produce something new; his art process consists of his own unique reconstitution which is then processed digitally and then put straight back on the streets. It is a kind of re-arrangement of the environment that makes the use of commercial art in this way ironic -- cutting up magazines, transforming the beautiful models into something ghoulish and sometimes political. Emissaries from the reclusive street art ingénue, they refuse to be quietly passed by.

The exhibition will feature installations by both artists and works that vary from small to large scale. The resulting worlds and portraits developed by both artists are at once intimate and, with an enormous, looming presence, monumental in their impact.