Union Gallery is pleased to announce Adapt to the Collapse, Mike Ballard’s first exhibition at the gallery, curated by William Gustafsson.
As an artist living in London, surrounded by the wave of gentrification flooding the city, Ballard is a spectator of the everyday urban environment in its constant flux. Using the cityscape as his primary source for material, Ballard conveys the weight of visual noise displayed in the urban matter, immortalizing the fabric of a city, giving new life to the often ignored.
Ballard has always been interested in urban society, born from his time writing graffiti, labelling himself as a graffiti writer, instead of artist, ignoring the notion of street art, telling his story by exploring the lines of legality and the private against the public.
Hoardings are the basis of his sculptural work. They function as protection for non-places stuck in a state of inbetweeness whilst bearing witness to the world going by. His fascination lies with ownership, displacement, the transitional and the division amongst the city. Ballard’s sculptural work bestows the energy of the aged, worn, weathered, lived from an unpainterly aesthetic rooted in the “found” edging toward the “ready made”. This aesthetic is chosen by Ballard for its utilitarian abstraction, fusing weathering, graffiti application and removal. Taken as sheet material and then given form by the reconfiguration and collage of different environments transforming from being a threshold, keeping people out and forming a dividing line between public and private property.
Ballard, is also a vice in his own ideology as he often reworks his sculptures injecting new dialogues into them, deconstructing and making new. This is the case with Adapt to the Collapse, which includes new elements but mostly was reworked from Ballard’s monumental sculpture Laying in the Cut presented at KAST projects in Plymouth earlier this year, 2018.
In Ballard’s painting he recreates a layered nostalgia from the “found” image which Ballard has taken himself. Signage holds an indispensable position within Ballard’s painting practice. Ballard’s interest lies in the abstract forms of the layering and aging process of urban surfaces. Seeking out these forms and compositions of urban matter taken from his local envirmonet Ballard uses gestural abstraction layered over these abstract remains, while preserving the appropriated. He superimposes the “found” imagery from his photographic transfers onto canvas using industrial mediums alongside more traditional tools, such as spray paint and oil and acrylic paint.
Mike Ballard (b. 1972, London, England) graduated from Central Saint Martins with an MA in Fine Art. He has previously exhibited at The Silver Building, London; Royal Academy of Arts, London; KARST, Plymouth; Unit 1 Gallery, London; Griffin Gallery, London; Parafin Gallery, London, amongst others. Residencies include the KARST Residency, Plymouth; Untapped Residency, Cyprus, Griffin Gallery Project Based Residency, amongst others. Collections include but not limited to David Roberts Foundation, Qatari Royal Family Collection, and University of the Arts, London.
Ballard currently lives and works in London.