Thru Cargo Garden, Arch 461, 83 Rivington St, London, EC2A 3AY
Tel: 020 7720 5802
PRESS RELEASE
Black Rat Press is delighted to introduce our stunning new gallery: a 2000 square foot, high brick
archway in the heart of Shoreditch. We have a full program planned of contemporary, international shows
with a street art slant including solo exhibitions of street art legends, Blek Le Rat and D*Face.
Our first exhibition is HEAP a collaborative installation designed specifically to fit our gallery space by the
huge collective talents of Swoon, David Ellis and Monica Canilao. Each of whom view collaboration as
a form of communication, a creative dialogue between their own mutual passions.
Swoon is a 29-year-old Brooklyn-based artist who draws from sources as diverse as German
Expressionist woodblock prints and Indonesian shadow puppets. In fact, nowhere is the public’s
predominant attitude towards graffiti as an ugly and menacing urban presence challenged more deeply
than in Swoon’s artistic output. Creating stunningly beautiful life-sized character studies from paper cut-
outs, woodblock prints and linocuts, Swoon has been a breath of fresh air to the world of street art,
bringing a deft feminine sensibility to bear on an ostensibly masculine scene.
Originating in America in the late 1970s as an extension of the burgeoning hip-hop movement with graffiti
throw-ups from the likes of TAKI 183 and Seen, street art has developed into an international, constantly
evolving, protean medium that encompasses graffiti, graphic design, stencils, cut-outs, fine art, sculpture
and even live performance. Street art is now everywhere, from the New York of Swoon and Faile, the pre-
Olympic buzz and clutter of Melbourne’s city walls to Blek Le Rat’s Paris and of course here in East
London, which, in the last few years, has become synonymous with British street art and, most famously,
Banksy.
Represented in NY by the highly regarded Jeffrey Deitch at his Deitch Projects Gallery, Swoon has
garnered huge critical acclaim for her installation shows. In 2006 MOMA showed an installation and
purchased a number of works for their collection.
David Ellis is an artist born into a family immersed in music. In his youth Ellis had little patience
with piano lessons or reading sheet music. Instead he absorbed everything on The Super Mix, a
Saturday night radio program broadcast from the nearby Fort Bragg military base. By the time
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5 released The Message, Ellis was writing rhymes and banging
out beats with his friends on the desks at school. Things have since become much louder.
Ellis’ work continues to interpret music and sound. His paintings are often recorded in a form of
digital time-lapse animation Ellis calls motion painting. Like jazz, these works provide Ellis with an
opportunity to combine ideas with collaborators or work solo within a form that promotes
improvisation and spontaneity. For a recent commission the artist painted a truck from sunup to
sundown over five consecutive days. Ellis often stages events when exhibiting his motion paintings,
inviting musicians, performers, and sound artists to interpret the work live.
His motion painting, Paint on Trucks in a World in Need of Love was recently exhibited at MoMA.
Monica Canilao is an exciting, young Oakland-based graduate of the California College of Arts and Crafts.
Canilao uses found paper, collage, sculpture and fabrics to create art that seeks to capture the human
condition. Finding a beauty and fragile sense of survival in discarded objects; objects she feels carry an
echo of humanity and a sense of embattled spirit, and so work to create an art textured by the life around
us.
While Swoon and David Ellis have collaborated before, together with Faile, for New Image Art in West
Hollywood, California this will be the first time they have worked with Monica. It will be very interesting to
see what Monica brings to the mix and how the work of three incredible talents melds together.
If you would like to be invited to the private press preview please RSVP to info@blackratpress.com