SHOW OF THE WEEK

coming round the mountain

This week is going to be all about mountains, apparently. We've just had a peek at the new Paul Pirie show "mountain rituals" on at Kick Gallery, imagine a hike to the top of the Andes, Staedtler pencils and sketchbook in hand, taking magic mushrooms with a crazy bearded mystic, coming over all crazed forth world supernatural insights and drawing for 36 hours straight. In short... quite a trip. In a far more lengthy explanation Pirie describes his current body of work as a series of “…abstract compositional paintings and drawings, delving into the relationships between naive shapes, imperfect lines, and organic painterly expressions.” While Kick Gallery tell us "Pirie's work contains ghetto influenced graffiti elements, lettering, characters and shapes, while combining his deep interest in abstract composition. The jagged, clashing aesthetic that this combination achieves is constantly pushing a juxtaposition of obsessive black and white pattern and line work, with flat daubs of loose, extravagant colour. The works convey a musical element, subconsciously achieved through aural influences of metal, rap, and punk music, creating a form of visual representation arrived at through musical inspiration. Thematically Mountain Rituals reflects a refined interest in hallucinogenic drug culture, Greek and Mexican myths and legends, as well as the relationship between humanity and the natural/supernatural world. Pirie’s works are filled with abstract monster characters, animated mountains, acid tripped landscape visions and magic spells that spill out to form a sub reality which allows the artist to create and explore a world of slow moving furry monsters, bad ass sperm eye balls, floating laser beam monster faces, and an orgy of magic words, repetitive patterns, and mountain rituals."
Whew... like we said people... quite a trip.

Which of course got us thinking more about trips in the mountains ... and after we'd stopped singing "Rocky Mountain High" (ahem) our first thought was of the super cool and kawaii hiking bear and crazy squirrel from Japanese design company mountain mountian .

The Japanese connection logically led us straight to the Mel Robson and Kenji Uranishi's Little People from Sandwich Mountain .

Which finally, via the touring rock dinosaur connection (note acca dacca tees), led us straight back to Janes Addiction and the fabulously anthemic Mountain song...

For younger readers we've given a link to the old school version of Janes Addiction we enjoyed back in the late 80's rather than the cleaned up contemporary incarnation... not to say that we aren't going to be there whooping it up with a few hundred of our fellow antiquarians at festival hall come July 30.

Mountain Rituals is on at Kick Gallery until June 13, Mountain Mountain is available at In the Woods in person and online at Giant Robot, Sandwich Mountain adventures can be seen on the Sandwich Mountain blog, and Mountain Song will most probably be the second encore song at Festival Hall on July 30.

Happy hiking people.