Art & Geometry

Every artist experiences the dreadful ‘artist block’, but Lee Griggs seems to have no grasp of such ridiculous notion, in his on-going series Deformations. When we wanted to talk about geometry, we couldn’t have imagined such a literal approach – his subjects look like they have swallowed it whole and forgot to spit out the bones. A cross between a cartoon character taking the shape of whatever it has eaten, or a Nightmare On Elm Street, comes this bewitching and intriguing digitally 3D scanned series.
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Grigg’s distorted utopia, where aliens are birthed, makes you scrutinize these freakish beings whilst peering through their disturbingly life-like masks. Each face as gruesome as the next one, we discover that we have somehow dug ourselves into a hole – searching for more as we scroll down in anticipation to squint and squirm in our seats. Hopefully not coming across a Paul McCarthy scene reenacted with these creatures.
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Grigg’s 3D scanned faces are downloaded from the production house Ten24 and rendered in a program called Arnold. What makes these creations more unsettling is their resemblance to human-faces, rather than resorting to colour or pigment permutation. The artist admittedly constructs these alien-human visages without even himself knowing the end product, simply experimenting with the original scan. His goal for the project is to create complex images with detailed deformations. The artist is fascinated with ‘blurring’ the lines between the real and surreal, and as a result has us ‘blocked’ in what he will come up with next.
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The anthropomorphic faces will fascinate, horrify and make someone point out to you to ‘stop staring’. We sure couldn’t, so we’ll let it pass this time and resist pointing.
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Be prepared to reconsider whatever you once thought impossible, when hell “Friezes” over. Yesterday, Frieze London opened its doors for an exclusive list of art lovers. We were there, and have to say things are getting a little bit bizarre and rather absurd. Floating skulls, secret doors, an enormous inflatable cat, and an intimate portrait session as you’ve never seen yourself before by Ken Kagami – are all just the tip of the iceberg. When we came across the performance piece Xifópagas Capilares by Tunga, which is essentially the twins from ‘The Shining’ meets Samara from ‘The Ring’, we frankly wanted to run in the opposite direction and never look back.

Here are some of our most ‘WTF’ finds. So, if you are going to Frieze, open up your imagination to experience all the things that are peculiar, intriguing and shocking.

1: Xifópagas Capilares by Tunga
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2: Dick Eye by Paul McCarthy
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3: Felix The Cat by Mark Leckey
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4: Sculpture #1 by Darren Bader
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5: Frieze Project Commission by Jeremy Herbert
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6: Layered Side-Swept Ombre by Nina Beier
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7: Portrait Session by Ken Kagami
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8: Still Life in the Doldrums by Anri Sala
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9: Wall Painting With Aphids by Carsten Holler
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10: The Collector at Rest by Mark Dion
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Banksy, the famous yet still unknown street artist, is definitely not celebrated for his meekness. Last weekend ARTCUBE paid a trip to his most recent feat Dismaland, the spoof theme park nestled in the dreary seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, UK. A place where nothing is super, until now.

The exhibition houses more than 50 artists, including big-names like Damien Hirst and those less-familiar such as Jimmy Cauty. Drawing in a wide range of visitors, Dismaland presents a diverse and electric array of artwork that are alluring for all the wrong reasons.
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Enter into a creepy atmosphere, where the murky skyline perfectly suits the scene as a dilapidated Disney Castle rises before your eyes. Surrounded by a lake for the sour and dire, Ariel emerges from the water in glitchy-glory. Inside the castle, Cinderalla has sadly not made it to the ball, instead her pumpkin carriage has been in a car crash and the paparazzi flock to the scene to snap shots of the dead princess. Does this sound familiar?
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Cinderella’s castle is just the icing on the cake. There is a dodgem of death or death on a dodgem and ‘Free Willy’ is leaping from a toilet basin. All may seem a little absurd, but every piece is charged with a critical stance against… well perhaps everything that is wrong with modern-day society, and everything is worthy of a selfie.
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We left with a sense of unease. Dismaland is successful because of its’ fierce political agenda, and yet despite all the darkness, the subversion, the satire, we enjoyed the journey and our overall experience of Banksy’s ‘bemusement park’ was ironically far from dismal.

‘Dismaland’ is open to the public until September 27 from 11am to 11pm.
Visit www.dismaland.co.uk for tickets