Pilgrim Baby! is an exhibition showing the playful exploration of a street artist.
X0000X is a Berlin based street artist who is best known for his stencils of glamour models. This dedication to commenting on advertising, fashion culture and the media has been sacriticed. Pilgmm baby! focuses much more on the bringing together of the artist’s interest in the mediums of photography, painting, video, sculpture and found objects’.
Entering the first exhibition room, huns on opposing sides of the space are two large, monochrome abstract paintings. The raw canvas is exposed between the rough, textured markings and words written mirror image painted on the surface. Through the accumulation of these marks one can visualise an aggressive and sporadic mark making process. As a child approaches a blank sheet of paper with no hesitation or pre-considered plan, X0000X seems to be working from a pre-cognitive mindset, allowing music or other extemal influences to drive the movements of his hand. They feel like a direct response of the time and place of where they were created.
In the window, expanding our understanding of how X000OX uses and interacts with his materials, is a video piece. A small sheet of paper is repeatedly attacked by a hand armed with a pencil. The dashes of the pencil on paper tap along with the bass of the music playing. Keeping up with the Oh-So-Berlin techno beat causes the paper to be tom and marked by dark, bold graphite lines. Once the hand feels that the paper is covered sufficiently, the sheet is discarded and replaced by a fresh piece.
And so the process continues. The constant repetition feels as though there is a question or theory trying to be answered through some sort of experiment. Its simplicity is direct and reveals something about the entire show as an investigation into different mediums using the context of our surroundings as inspiration.
