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Sunday, February 27, 2011

Love this work: Street art scales down: why Cordal and Slinkachu are masters of miniature | The Observer

Excerpt from Tom Lamont's article for the GuardianUK:

"Most urban artists find the biggest obstacle to their work is Johnny Law – that ill-timed arrival of a policeman interrupting a graffiti epic mid-completion, a complicated installation having to be abandoned to flight. Not the case for artists Slinkachu and Isaac Cordal, who specialise in "miniature street sculpture": for them the biggest dangers are roadsweepers, heavy-shoed pedestrians and jackdaws.

Since 2006 these two London-based artists have been (independently) installing tiny dioramas in cities around the world, taking photographs – then leaving their work to be kicked or ignored or taken away. In one striking piece, Slinkachu constructed a scene of children bathing in a discarded chicken tikka takeaway in east London; in another, he positioned a group of riot police posing for holiday snaps in front of the Acropolis in Greece. Cordal put a row of suited men emerging from a grate at ankle height in Brussels, and a suicidal-looking figure on a high beam in Hackney. No individual sculpture by either is more than 5cm in height.

"I don't hang around to see what happens to the work," says Slinkachu, 31, a London-based former art director who prefers not to reveal his real name. "I don't want not to know. But there is a strange kind of buzz to abandoning your creations on the street."

Next month he will exhibit photographs of his past work, as well as installing some purpose-built new pieces at the Andipa Gallery in London for his show, Concrete Ocean.

Spanish-born Cordal's work, meanwhile, will be collected in his first solo book, Cement Eclipses, published by Carpet Bombing Culture in May..."

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales

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