Twist.

Twist (AKA Barry McGee) has an exhibition in the City of Melbourne right now, and because I know you're all too busy going to the Von Bondies and shopping at Supre, I've gone to the effort of bringing the exhibition to you.

For those of you that aren't familiar with Twist, I've included an Age article at the very bottom of this post to bring you up to speed. Or, if you're a subscriber, the link is here.

I'll also throw in a couple of shots from the water wall at the National Gallery of Victoria, and some pen drawings from his Dad.

Basically he's a post-industrial, post-apocalyptic fine artist with a background in graff writing, who paints his instantly recognisable characters on the surfaces of video and DVD machines, but also uses whole trucks and vans to tag on and stack on top of one another.

Scroll down to see his paintings on bottles, they're truly mind-blowing, especially to see right up close.

Hope y'all like it...as with all my pics, they open bigger in a new window if you want to get up close and smell the paint.

Here is a link to another one of my blog posts involving Melbourne street artists up in Sydney, and here is an article in The Age which talks about them and me.
Here is a link to my blog post about the City Lights Project here in Melbourne.











































































































































































































































































































________________________________________

How's this for a Twist?
By Jo Roberts
October 27, 2004

American graffiti comes to Melbourne courtesy of the shy but subversive Barry McGee.

The artist chosen to launch the next phase of the Meat Market has never exhibited in Australia before. But even before his show officially opens tonight, you may have inadvertantly noticed a couple of his works already adorning Melbourne's walls. Or sewer system.

Barry McGee began doing graffiti when he was about 18 years old. Although he went on to graduate from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991, and now also works in sculpture, video, installations and drawings, the art McGee, now 38, remains most passionate about is graffiti, or "tagging" - which he still does on his own San Franciscan streets.

"It's the best thing, it's better than any art," says the quietly spoken artist, also known by his street name, Twist. "It's exhilarating, it's illegal. People get upset about it, you know? It's the one thing that people can get really upset about, that they really hate."

The irony is, McGee's art is far from hated. Internationally recognised, he has taken part in such prestigious events as the 2001 Venice Biennale and the 2002 Liverpool Biennale, and exhibited in major galleries around the world, while maintaining a firm toehold in subculture. Being invited to biennales is hardly being hated? "Yeah, it's weird that way," he says. "It's weird how people can hate tagging, but they have nothing to say about corporate advertising, or the trams here that are covered with advertising, you know what I mean?"
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McGee, a thin man of Chinese-Irish-American descent, is as painfully shy as he is prolific. In the yawning main hall of the Meat Market, he busily installs his myriad works - how many? "I lost track" - with the help of his two assistants, Kevin and Josh. At home in San Francisco, the three avid surfers have their work meetings on the beach.

Watching the construction site from her stroller nearby is McGee's daughter Asha who lets out a delighted squeal. McGee's wife - fellow artist and surfer Margaret Kilgallen - died of breast cancer in 2001, just weeks after Asha's birth.

In one room off the Meat Market's main hall, McGee is "plastering" the walls with his colourful, geometric paintings. A rainbow of them already adorn most of one wall of the main hall. But the centrepiece is Truck Pyramid, a tower of 11 derelict trucks, with wheels still moving, indicators still flashing. And underneath the twisted, tagged mountain of steel? A bathroom, complete with cubicles, skanky basins and a robotic figure, spray-painting a tag onto the long bathroom mirror.

That looks incredible. Can we get a photo of you with that, Barry? McGee winces like he's just been shot. But he obliges, squirming, looking backwards at a laughing Kevin, who poses at a basin. "Can you look at the camera, Barry" asks the photographer gently. "I can't look straight at you," pleads McGee, looking as if he'd rather chew off his own arm.

John Kaldor of Kaldor Art Projects has brought McGee to Australia. As his charge grimaces through another photo, Kaldor tells of the artist's first visit here in February to view the Meat Market. Arriving in the morning, by the time they'd had dinner that night McGee had already networked some local taggers to take him down into Melbourne's sprawling sewer system, to look at the local graffiti - and to perhaps leave a tag himself.

He has also spray painted the water wall at the National Gallery of Victoria.

"He's an incredible contrast of shy and almost diffident - and really quite subversive," says Kaldor.

And yes, he has done some graffiti in Melbourne in the three weeks he's been here this time. "Just a couple. Not too much. Just mainly looking," whispers McGee. "You won't have to look too far to run into something."

In the United States, tagging is a jailable offence. Just two months ago while in New York, McGee was arrested and spent three days in jail. Although he admits, it wasn't quite tagging. "I was writing some anti-Bush stuff and it was a week before the Republican Convention. I think they were a little uptight," he smiles.




This is knifey, from 'the internet'.