It all started with a shirt.
"The interesting thing is that a totally innocuous moment can change everything," George Shaw co-owner of the Oi You! Collection, says.
"We were going to a 40th birthday party and we knew it was going to be a big do. I went to get some new clothes and found this shirt."
The striped shirt had two stencilled characters on the back wearing gas masks. A guest at the party asked if the shirt design was by Banksy. Shaw did not know Banksy, but a hangover internet search the next day soon put him in the picture.
"For the first time in my life I saw art that I really really had a desperate desire to have. How do I own this stuff? Where do I get it from?'' he says.
George and his wife, Shannon started buying as much Banksy artwork as they could afford. They sold both their cars and spent a bank loan intended for home redecoration on Banksy art. "That was the start of it all; just that innocuous moment. I almost didn't buy the shirt. If I hadn't bought the shirt, I don't know what would have happened."
What did happen was an important private collection of Street Art was born. The Oi You! Collection owned by George Shaw and his wife Shannon Webster features 22 works by the illusive Banksy, along with other leading names in the Street Art genre, Faile, Antony Micallef, Swoon and David Choe amongst others.
Banksy
(b. Bristol, England)
Banksy is Britain's most celebrated graffiti artist, although having never revealed his identity. Starting out as a graffiti writer in 1992, subjective and satirical Banksy is renowned for using distinctive stencilling artwork to promote alternative aspects of politics from those promoted by mainstream media.
Voted in Time Magazine's top 100 most influential people, Banksy's first film Exit Through the Gift Shop was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2011. Collected by Brad Pitt and David Beckham amongst others, the auction record for any of Banksy's work is Keep it Spotless, a Damien Hirst spot painting defaced with the image of a chamber maid apparently lifting up the bottom of the canvas.
In 2009, a Banksy show, curated by the artist himself at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, was in the top 30 most visited shows in the world.
Swoon
(b. 1978, Daytona Beach, Florida, USA)
New York- based artist Caledonia Dane Curry, aka Swoon, is best known for her striking life-sized wheat-pasted prints and paper cutouts. Swoon studied painting at the Pratt Institutue in Brooklyn and started doing street art around 1999. Exploiting the ephemeral qualities of her chosen materials, Swoon creates a type of guerrilla public art that embraces incidental wear and tear. The figures she depicts have a timeless quasi-mythic feel that depict realistically rendered people, often her friends and family, on the streets in various places around the world. Usually, pieces are pasted on uninhabited locations such as abandoned buildings, bridges, fire escapes, water towers and street signs. Her work is inspired by both art historical and folk sources, ranging from German Expressionist wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets.
Antony Micallef
(b. 1975, Swindon, England)
Antony Micallef is a graduate in Fine Arts from the University of Plymouth. Micallef's work illustrates many contemporary cultural aspects and connects them with the human experience. His use of neutral colors and depictions of the human form delve beyond pop culture and bring to the surface many of the things that operate underneath the cultural construct. Aspects of Micallef's work examines our dichotomous relationship with consumerism , questioning how we can despise multi-national brands yet still allow ourselves to be seduced by them. He frequently uses the union of two opposites to make an intriguing chemistry. Micallef's practice has been summarized as 'critical pop', exposing the darker side of our consumerist society and thehuman condition.
Faile
Faile (Pronounced "fail", and which is an anagram of A Life) is a Brooklyn-based artistic collaboration between Patrick McNeil (b. 1975, Edmonton, Canada) and Patrick Miller (b. 1976, Minneapolis, MN, USA). Since their inception in 1999, FAILE have been known for their pioneering use of wheatpasting and stenciling, and for their explorations of duality through a fragmented style of appropriation and collage. Faile use a wide array of media, from wooden boxes and window pallets to more traditional canvas, prints, sculptures, stencils, multimedia installation, and prayer wheels.
David Choe
(b 1976, Los Angeles, CAL, USA)
Choe is an American painter, muralist, graffiti artist and graphic novelist of Korean descent.He achieved art world success with his "dirty style" figure paintings - raw, frenetic works which combine themes of desire, degradation, and exaltation. Outside of galleries, he is closely identified with the bucktoothed whale he has been spray-painting on the streets since he was in his teens.
Choe's work appears in a wide variety of urban culture and entertainment contexts. For example, he provided the cover art for Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s album Collision Course, and created artwork to decorate the sets of movies, Juno and the Glass House. In 2007, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg commissioned him to paint murals for their office. During the 2008 presidential race, Choe painted a portrait of then-Senator Barack Obama for use in a grassroots street art campaign. The original now hangs in the White House.
Os Gemeos
(b.1974, Sao Paulo)
Some of the biggest names in Street Art, twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio work together under the name Os Gemeos which means ‘the twins’ in Portugese. They started painting graffiti in 1987 and gradually became one of the main influences in the local scene, helping to define Brazil's own style. Their work often features yellow-skinned characters - taken from the yellow tinge both of the twins have in their dreams and their style draws on Brazilian folklore characters and South American magic realism.
Paul Insect
(b. 1971, Britain)
Paul Insect is a UK street artist, who is most famous for his 2007 solo show Bullion exhibition at London's Lazarides Gallery. Insect, who also goes by the name of PINS worked alongside well known artist Banksy at the Cans Festival, Santas Ghetto, and on the separation wall in Palestine.
Insect is well known for his collective named 'insect' which started in 1996, and disbanded in 2005.Insect held an exhibition at a disused Sex shop in London's Kings Cross area in 2008 in partnership with Lazarides Gallery. This contained 12 bronze skulls with colour enameled bunny ears - Dead Playboy Bunnygirls.
Adam Neate
(b.1977, Suffolk, Britain)
Adam Neate is a British painter, street artist and conceptual artist.He specialises in painting urban art on recycled cardboard and has left thousands of works in the street for anyone to collect. He is a contributor to the movement in transferring street art into galleries.
In the mid-1980s, he became familiar with graffiti art through a cousin. Neate watched videos about graffiti, as well as groups such as the Beastie Boys and hip-hop music. Then he borrowed books like Spray Can Art and Subway Art from the library: he was attracted by the colourful quality of the artwork, which he wanted to emulate.
He did not study painting, but graduated in design at Suffolk College then moved to London and took a job as a graphic designer in an advertising agency.
Judith Supine
Supine is a 29-year-old artist living in Brooklyn, NY. Supine could not speak until a month after his seventeenth birthday. He could not physically articulate words, he could only squeak and grunt. Supine often drew pictures to communicate with his family. His Mum saved all of his pictures, just one of many reasons why his Mum is great.
Judith Supine uses materials that are free or at least real cheap. He uses an exacto-knife, glue sticks, cheap ugly paints and real sleazy magazines that make him sexually uncomfortable. Judith Supine gets his magazines out of people's trash, from the public library, from the dentist's offices, from his little sister's magazine collection, from bankrupt porn shops.
D*Face
"D*Face" aka. Dean Stockton is an English multimedia street artist who uses spray paint, stickers, posters, and stencils.He grew up in London and had a childhood interest in graffiti. He credits this to Henry Chalfant's coverage of New York subway graffiti in Spraycan Art and Subway Art, later as a teenager skateboarding and in particular Thrasher magazine's coverage of skateboard deck graphics led his interest in stickers and the DIY mentality associated with skate and punk fanzines. He attended an illustration and design course and worked as a freelance illustrator/designer whilst honing his street work. Influences included Shepard Fairey's "Obey Giant" art campaign, Jim Philips, hip hop, punk music, and popular animated cartoons.
Bast
Brooklyn-based Bast has been an intricate part of the street art scene fro the past ten years throughout New York and Europe, where his wheat-pasted images feature prominently across the urban landscape.
Interestingly the artist has remained an elusive character that has rarely been seen in public and whose very existence has been debated. Little is known of his work outside of what the public sees throughout New York’s urban environment, but fortunately, more has become known as Bast’s images have evolved to gallery status in recent years.
Phil Frost
Phil Frost is a self-taught artist whose unique work brings together aspects of urban culture, abstraction, tribalism, and design. In the 1990s, Frost honed his skills by painting walls, found objects and street detritus with his intricate, compulsive and highly evolved form of graffiti. He painstakingly crafts his colorful mixed-media paintings and totemic sculptures by collaging layers of found imagery on grounds of flat, symmetrical black-and-white patterning.
Evan Hecox
Evan Hecox is a designer/illustrator specializing in creating graphics for posters, skateboards and his inked drawings capture urban dwellings and their dwellers from New York to Mexico with a snapshot style that’s at once hyper-real and romantic. His work has been featured across record covers and art galleries alike, from Chocolate Industries vinyl to white walls in Tokyo, London and Los Angeles.
Henry Chalfont
Henry Chalfant was born in 1940 in Pennsylvania, USA. He is a well known and respected photographer and videographer of urban culture. Chalfant has also made several films about graffiti and break dance, most famous being "Style Wars" from 1984. In 1984 Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper wrote the definitive book on New York graffiti called "Subway Art".
Mike Mills
Mike Mills, a Los Angeles-based visual artist and filmmaker, is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art.,Over the years he has managed to produce work in both the art and commercial spheres, blurring the lines between the two. Mills has exhibited his work internationally, including Alleged Gallery, New York, the MU Art Foundation, Eindhoven, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Colette, Paris, among others. He has also created graphics for clothing designers X-Girl and Marc Jacobs, music videos for Air, Pulp, and Yoko Ono, television commercials for Nike, Volkswagen, and Gap, and record covers for the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, among others. His short films and documentaries, Deformer (1996), The Architecture of Reassurance (1999), and Paperboys (2000), have shown at the Sundance, New York, and Rotterdam film festivals. Mills recentlly completed his first feature film, Thumbsucker.
Ryan McGinness
Ryan McGinness (born 1972) is an American artist, living and working in Manhattan, New York. He grew up in the surf and skate culture of Virginia Beach, Virginia, and then studied at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as an Andrew Carnegie Scholar. During college, he interned at the Andy Warhol Museum as a curatorial assistant.
Known for his original extensive vocabulary of graphic drawings which use the visual language of public signage, corporate logos, and contemporary iconography, McGinness creates paintings, sculptures, and environments
Cheryl Dunn
Cheryl Dunn is a filmmaker and photographer based in New York City. Her work is influenced by alternative urban and youth culture, documenting skaters, the homeless, musicians, graffiti, artists and their processes. Dunn graduated with a degree in Art History from Rutgers University, traveled throughout Europe and lived in Milan.
Pause at the top of the stairwell as you enter the Oi You! Collection and enjoy a selection of works loaned by Sydney-sider Joe Short. Sixteen pieces are on display including work from artists including Banksy, Faile, Dolk, Penny, D*face and Lucy MacLauchlan.
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