The group exhibition 3to get ready will open at Zadik Gallery on September 8, 2011 at 20:00, with DJ Yonatan Kutner at the opening night party.
Zadik says: Dede, SBOY and Latzi, three street artists meet together in the space of Zadik gallery. The exhibition does not intend to bring the street into the gallery but rather to enable them to exhibit their art without the street’s dirty context. So, when we meet their work in the streets again and recognize them, the art will give significance to our subconscious blurry daily routine.
Baruch Jamili wrote his name on a water-reservoir on the way to Jerusalem immortalizing himself as a soldier in the war of independence (and later in Shlomo Artzi’s song). So does Dede using his street art to leave a mark, a statement and his name in the urban realm. Dede uses his images covering walls, fences and warehouses to communicate basic messages addressing everyone. Dede’s art, competing for the spectator’s attention with Castro and Coke billboards, attacks modern consumerism with humor and cynicism. The graphic images: shopping cart, pigeon and band-aid complement ironic yet piercing texts regarding our obsessive shopping. In the street he takes over the repressed significance of our actions thus trying to reform western culture’s prevailing consumerism agenda. Dede chooses to work during the night in stealth and anonymity. In the dark he can work lawless, devoid of public, privileged to express himself freely – like a superhero – putting-on and taking-off his costume and personality. This split-personality generates immediate techniques: prefabricated images, gluing, spraying and the use of industrial colors.
Latzi too chooses anonymity when she goes out into the street, but unlike Dede she has no social reproach. Latzi chooses to work in the street because these circumstances let the savage in her emerge. While as a regular artist in her daily life she is sensitive to convention she becomes an outlaw in the street. She doesn’t care what the spectator might think. Her street art is a test of how studio art works in the street arena. When she is outdoors Latzi chooses doors, metal covers and surfaces that have passed infinite hands as the platform for paintings that she brings from home. Latzi thus treats the street as a spatial gallery lacking curator with obscure audience. The freedom is represented in unclassifiable images: neither men nor woman, pretty or ugly, pet or beast. Rather they are a mix of elements affirming an independent entity devoid of gender, color, sex. The technique is similarly unfocused: gluing on various types of paper, use of acrylic and markers, abstract smears beside realistic precision, resulting in an esthetically articulate chaos.
SBOY is the only one identified by his real name – Zak Shiff. He selected the nickname SBOY two years ago when disappointed with the artist-gallery interaction he moved to create in the street. Illegal underground work, family responsibility and fear of getting caught made him sign as SBOY.
SBOY is the character drawn by Zak Shiff. STUPIDBOY, system man, going daily to his downtrodden job, the routine clerk, the man compelled to obey social laws, dressing accordingly, eating correctly, earning appropriately, “com-il-faut”, on the verge of burnout. In spite of the red colorful graphics, SBOY is not comic. He is in fact desperate. Apparently, SBOY seems to operate in a childish world, driving a tricycle, drinking colorful drinks. A more profound look reveals the somber expressionistic setting he lives in. Tension taking over the viewer is the product of the paradox between SBOY’s obsession with routine and his disgust from it. Shiff’s outdoor message is that routine provides a framework for daily conduct, sources of inspiration and calm. But a single extra drop of routine is explosive. By working in the street Shiff implements his credo that any man should make himself heard out loud and should never surrender to a life of submission. Shiff no longer operates underground. He gets permission for his street work from the authorities. But like Latzi and Dede he too chooses to leave a resounding mark on our lives in a multitude of layers.
Zadik Gallery, 16 Shimon Hazadik Street, Jaffa, +972- 77-495-6981
