There was a very long line in front of the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City on Saturday night, as many people wanted to see ‘Going Nowhere Fast’, the new exhibition by UK street artist D*Face.
We had to wait quite a long time to get into the packed little gallery, but the scene was building a sort of excitement due to the large crowd, the photographs taking pictures of the people leaving with the same reproduction of his take on Lichtenstein’s 'The Kiss' (turned to a Kiss of Death), a vision which kept me reminding about the recent and excellent documentary ‘Exit through the gift shop’…
Street art is hot, people love it! D*Face and the gallery had put on a real show for the grand opening: This week, the artist and his team had painted an outside wall of the gallery with a giant rendition of one of his Lichtenstein-influenced work, actors portraying some D*Face(d) Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson, the three most iconic stars of pop art were hanging around the gallery, the artist himself was there, signing autographs for everyone, a DJ was spinning records, and I saw ‘Off the Wall’ in his bin,… of course, and they were offering traditional English scones!
But there is nothing traditional about D*Face, he likes to destroy icons, and Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson only looked good on their right side, and were defaced on the other side, similar to Christina Aguilera on the cover of her album Bionic, which is also D*Face’s work.
He calls his work as aPOPcalyptic, or ‘a metaphorical backdrop for the corruptive persuasive consumerist folly that has been force fed into society’. This apocalyptic message of death is violently injected into every pop icon, or every ordinary object, with a touch of humor,… yeah what’s the deal with these little white cartoonish wings he draws on each side of everybody’s head? ‘It’s where/what you want to be’, he simply answered to this question when my friend and I had the chance to ask him. D*Face is very approachable, I mean he is very humble and down to earth, but it was very hard to get a hold on him because of the large and hungry crowd!
Nothing is safe, especially the American dream, and in this movie-star-town, the gold Oscar statue at the entrance was partially skinned, the Hollywood hill was made of skulls with a half-burnt sign, and Barack Obama was the subject of one of his numerous ‘Read & Destroy, Reappropriated Books’ with the cynical condemnation ‘Puppet on a Chain/The Audacity of Hope/is Dead’, may be a sort of answer to the famous Shepard Fairey’s blue and red HOPE campaign.
Talking about re-appropriation, D*Face ‘steals’ to everyone, from Andy Warhol to Keith Haring to Lichtenstein already mentioned, to punk rock – just look at his punk-ed Mohawk-ed Queen Elizabeth à la Sex Pistols – to comic books and cartoons, to skateboard culture (he cites Thrasher skateboard Magazine as an inspiration when he was young),… he wants to cheat death but reminds us constantly, with a powerful imagery, that death is omnipresent.
There also were these unclassifiable pieces, like ‘Backstabbers’, a flight of knives turned into ferocious sharks, and especially this series of real insects, butterflies or rather ‘Flutterdies’, whose bodies had been replaced by skulls or spray can nozzles.
So I don’t know if we are all ‘Going Nowhere,.. and Fast’, it sounds like a punk rock song (apparently it is even an album by the punk band Satanic Surfers), it may well be a metaphor for life,… and it was written on every support from neon sign to tombstones.
D*Face’s work can be viewed until April 27th at the Corey Helford Gallery, and then he will be a featured artist at Britweek in Los Angeles from April 26th to May 11th.
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