the black rat press
This Newsletter is Staring Wistfully Out the Window and Wondering How Long Summer Will Last and If the Dead Will Walk the Earth…
Hello. Let us just start by saying we know how you feel, sitting there at your desk, neurotically monitoring each moment of sunshine, convinced that every time the sun goes in behind the clouds, that’s it, the summer’s over. Worrying that it won’t last until the weekend, that Glastonbury will be another wash-out and that banks of low scudding thunderheads will settle overhead like a vast flotilla of late-nineties Hollywood spaceships, dwarfing the earth, shrouding us in perpetual darkness and plunging us back into the middle ages, where packs of mangy, flea-ridden, curs will start to yap and snarl in the streets, wild-eyed, rabid, monkeys will police our rooftops in screaming death packs, attacking anyone who sets foot outside their house before gravestones shudder, graves bubble with earth and the undead silently rise again, spasming down the sunless streets in their musty, fetid rags. But it’s okay, you’re not alone. We understand. We’re worried it that too.
Also, that and the way humous tastes fizzy after its gone off.
So, gather round children, to take your mind off the approaching armageddon we’d like to announce two important upcoming Black Rat events.
The first one, which is not actually the first one, chronologically, is this:
The Logan Hicks solo show, July 3rd, 2008
This is a major show on any number of levels. Firstly, because Logan is possibly the consummate stencil artist of our times. Logan’s stunningly intricate, painstaking and near-photorealist layered stencil pieces have the rest of the stencil-artworld drooling and wondering if he isn’t slightly autistic. The Black Rat show will be his first UK solo show and feature a new body of work. Another reason this is an important show is that Logan does a lot of his work on large, deep, physically-satisfying pieces of wood, which means if the dead have risen and taken to the streets by the 3rd of July we can use them to barricade ourselves into the gallery, where we’ll be able to survive on beer and water until around ten o’clock—at which point we will ask you politely to leave and fend for yourselves among East London’s legion of undead.
And the second upcoming event, which is actually the first, follows now:
Handworked Swoon charity prints
We will be releasing a series of unique Swoon charity prints, online throughout this very week. These will be small, beautifully hand-worked prints with 100% of the proceeds going to the Braddock Active Arts charity.
http://www.braddockactivearts.org/#placeMarker
By the way, we do mean beautifully hand-worked by Swoon herself, of course. We did think about asking Leon to have a go, but he’d only mess it up. You know what he’s like. He still thinks Crayola is a food group.
We know. We don’t understand it either, but there it is.
But anyway, there you are. If that doesn’t get you through another anxious summer of unpredictable weather, avenging monkeys, and the impending zombie apocalaypse we don’t know what will. See you at the show,
BRP