This Is The Spot!

Kicking off 2017 in January at London’s Lawrence Alkin Gallery is ‘This Is The Spot!’ – the highly anticipated debut solo show by female UK street artist, Shuby.

Inspired by movie posters, small ads and tart cards, ‘This Is the Spot!’ explores the beginnings of the UK porn industry. Drawing on early 1960s nudist films such as Take Your Clothes Off And Live! and sex comedies like Can You Keep It Up For A Week?, the show focuses on a unique era in UK cinema.

Over the past decade, worldwide film memorabilia has featured widely throughout Shuby’s collages and street art. The artist felt it a natural step to turn her attention onto Soho cinema clubs and the films they showed in an all-new body of work. She said:

“I love retro film imagery and Soho, so it was a pleasure and an opportunity to research the history of cinema clubs and the films relating to the area. Having grown up by the seaside loving naughty post cards in the ‘Carry On’ era, sex comedy posters really appeal to my sense of humor.”

‘This Is The Spot!’ features 18 large silkscreen one-off canvases in traditional pop art style. The artist has taken newspaper small ads and blown them up to over a metre wide, enjoying the simple graphics and rough nature of the printed matter. Incorporating motifs, such as her signature-masked bunny, bananas and googly-eyed bowler hats, Shuby has added her own twist to the imagery. She explains:

“The masked rabbit represents a cheeky playful crusader that could be male or female. My banana motif has always been an ‘up yours’ to convention and the establishment. The bowler hats symbolise the city gents of London that flooded into the area to watch films like ‘Come Play With Me’ - the longest running movie in British cinema history starring porn pioneer Mary Millington.”

The Soho area has been at the heart of London's sex industry for over 200 years. Before the introduction of the Street Offences Act in 1959, prostitutes packed the streets and alleys of Soho and by the early sixties the area was home to nearly a hundred strip clubs. Almost every doorway in Soho was adorned with calling cards and neon signage, which made the area distinctive.

In this new body of work, Shuby has recreated a calling card she remembers taking from a phone box in the 80s, that was full of the small, brightly coloured ads. The card advertised ‘The Best Nipples In London’ and has been reimagined on a much larger scale. The artist also honours the less-documented male calling card with ‘Fit Fast and Fun’, a colourful silkscreen canvas featuring a strapping young man in three unique colour ways.
Shuby commented: “I’m not attempting to enter into the politics of the sex industry and the people that work in it. The show is more an appreciation of the history and humorous graphics that have sold us the promise of sex from a bygone era.”

In addition to the works on canvas, Shuby has created two editions of five large wall mirrors featuring silkscreen images. One set resembles comical X-Ray Spex, the other are the iconic frames of the inimitable anti porn campaigner Mary Whitehouse, disapprovingly framing scantily dressed ladies.

“While X-ray glasses ads were often found in the back of comics sparking the imagination of a generation of youngsters, Mary Whitehouse was the prudish campaigner who disapproved of female nudity in the media. The mirrored glasses add an extra layer to the theme of voyeurism and who’s watching who.”
Writer, broadcaster and film maker, Simon Sheridan, author of Keeping the British End Up and Director of Respectable: The Mary Millington Story, says of Shuby’s work: “Colourful, cheeky and affectionate, ‘This Is The Spot!’ really resonates today because so much of the West End's original character has been lost in recent years. It's an absolutely beautiful collection of work."