Where were you when you first heard Wild Thing? What was the first rock tune you bought? Did you save up? Spend a week’s pocket money? How old were you when you first learnt the lyrics to U2’s Where the Streets Have No Name? Which song did you fall in love to? Ensconced in musical references and asides, David Spiller’s latest exhibit at London’s Beaux Art Gallery explores a life through song…
Spiller’s studio is always filled with music. Putting the finishing touches to his new show Tryin’ to Get to Heaven Before They Close the Door, to be held at Beaux Arts, he stretches across his floor – an open plan studio scattered with life-size canvases and stencils of Hanna Barbara’s finest – listening to the songs that have shaped his life. The song that played when he had his first kiss. An album that he learnt to strum along to by ear. A CD that reminds him of his quiet Kent-spent youth, the sing-a-long choruses taking him back to a time when, he tells Mooks, he mixed his passion of music with “…the Marx Brothers, Bugs Bunny, Roy Rogers, Superman and Flash Gordon….”
Many of his works are created by laboriously stitching together panels of material, swatches of colour and text, placed atop a Mickey Mouse, a Daffy Duck, an Olive Oil, over which he then graffitis. Spiller’s colourful re-invention of the American Pop aesthetic is born of his keen eye and ear for the lyrical phrases and comic book ephemera of popular culture, and he uses the collective cultural symbolism of cartoons and the shared heritage of 20th Century music to speak to us all.
Latest canvases use fragments of lyrics to appeal to the viewer’s personal history, to try to take them back to a simpler time and evoke an instant emotional attachment. His latest pieces bear monikers like “All my love I will give to you”… “We’ll meet again at the Gates of Eden” (a line from Daydream Believer)…. “Wild Thing, I think I love you”...lyrics from disparate groups and musicians: U2, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, communicating with quotations of the love songs we grew up listening to, singing, buying, hating, but most of all, experiencing.
David Spiller: Tryin’ to Get to Heaven Before They Close the Door exhibits at Beaux Arts London from September 9 to October 3.
