Pick Me Up

I first came across the work of Rob Ryan about 5 or six years ago. I was at the V&A Village fete, an 'alternative' village fete held in the John Madejski gardens of the V&A every summer, run by artists and art collectives. as you'd expect, you pay to play games and then you can win things - but here the games are skewed as artists re-interpret the rules, and the winnings are more often than not art prints or crafty things.

Dressed as 'Robot' Ryan in a collection of tin-foil covered cardboard boxes, Rob Ryan manned a 'play your cards right' stall. It's a game i'd never played, but proceeded to win rather decisively (ha). the game's fee of £1 was all it took to win a print, but a side effect of my winnings was a bad Rob Ryan art habit which i cannot seem to kick. Each year since then i have returned to win a print, whatever the cost of loosing-until-i-win amounts to. The biggest loss one year being my pride, as the game consisted of dancing to the noises of barnyard animals on a plastic sheet decorated with said animals faces - you had to leap onto the face of the animal that matched the bleating/mooing/neighing/quacking as it blasted out of the speakers and were marked out of 100 by the roar of audience appreciation (or lack thereof). deliciously humiliating if you weren't involved. and to to heap upon the ignominy there was a crowd several people thick watching various desperate fools partake in the game. (it was pretty hilarious to watch if from a safe distance). it took me about 1/2 hour to build up the courage to debase myself thus. still, i came home gleefully clutching a print in my sweaty palms.

As well as prints i also have amassed/bought/been given various other prints, plus books (either by him, or novels that he has done covers for), tiles, invitations (the fashion and art worlds love getting him to make bespoke invitations and Christmas cards which i'm lucky enough to receive), and which are dotted around my flat. i bought the above laser cut out for my best friend for her birthday (the arrows point to a dictionary definition of the word WONDERFUL). if i had more money, i'd throw it at my addiction and buy up everything. well, not everything, but lots, certainly.

Anyway... massive deviation. the point of this post is really to talk about Pick Me Up, which i went to on Sunday, and which is being held at Somerset House all week (until may 3rd). It's a Graphic Art Fair, with lots of emerging and established contemporary graphic artists and art collectives - including Rob Ryan, Print Club London and Le Gun. Rob Ryan has carted his studio (or a simulacrum of it) to Somerset House, where creative operations take place for a week. the walls are covered with his work, and various laser cutter machines and printing press machines line up to churn out work. It's fascinating to watch operations and see so much of his work hanging together. His laser cuts are mesmerisingly beautiful - delicate and intimate, and they invoke a childlike bubble of emotion that speaks to one's inner hopeless, imaginative, solitary, sensitive romantic.

The rest of the show was fairly mixed - much not really appealing to my taste, being a bit to pixelated or oblique in its impact, but what i did love, i really did. Le Gun's installation Le Bum was genius: a giant ass that blasted out The Pet Shop Boys and which you poked your head in the sphincter of to view a monochrome mural which skipped through time, style and design, fusing genres, styles, fashions, figures from all over the shop. the label read: "Le Bum is made with the arse-pertise of Matt Duddleston and Gary Cross". the collective Peepshow were making colourful prints on site to buy. Print Club were selling screen prints with punchy images and sayings for £50. I also loved prints by artists Pierre Nguyen, - his dark broody images of girls, and those by Erin Petson - strange fashion-esque illustration with a macabre twist.