Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu
Well, I’ve mentioned Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu quite a few times over the last few months but I’ve finally got around to actually getting a copy and I can properly report its brilliance. Hopefully I won’t have to say to much about what Slinkachu does for this very reason. However, for those in need of a quick foundation - Slinkachu is a street artist; a tiny one. He himself isn’t tiny (although I’ve not had the pleasure in meeting him!) but his work is. Tiny little hand painted people are taken out into the real world and have to deal with the same shit that the rest of us have to but on an altogether different scale…literally. If they are not dodging lorry sized lumps of bird crap then they’re getting stuck in lumps of chewing gum! Not all of their troubles come from us though. Sometimes they cause their selves as many problems as we do. There’s a fight between office workers and even an indecent exposure!
However, they don’t all spend their day watching out for giant troubles or even troubles on their own scale; many of the Little People are just going about their own business with little regard for the rest of us. Chilling in the pool (a manhole!). Taking out the bin. Hanging out the washing. You know the kind of thing; it’s the kind of thing that the rest of us do.
I recently had the pleasure of seeing some more large-scale work from this project over at Cosh and the pieces on show were amazing. Like in this book, each piece was accompanied by a sibling piece with a zoomed out photo of the whole scene so you could see the Little People in the same way as you would have don’t if you had been lucky enough to have caught them during their transient short lives.
The think that I like best about the book, and the exhibition at Cosh last month I guess, is that the man Slink managed to keep so much of his new work unpublished on the internet. This meant that so much of the content is completely fresh, exciting and surprising. He’s done a great job of bringing his Little People into book form too and I bet that all the Little People are feeling very proud of being involved with such a great project. Here’s to Volume II.
Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu weighs in at 128 pages. Get it from all the usual places including Amazon UK but preferably from an indie store near you.