Indie Spotlight: Pure Evil Gallery
HUCK takes a tour around the East London art gallery with a very simple mantra.
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There’s no denying that street art and graffiti have become an unavoidable part of day-to-day urban living across the world. Take a walk around Shoreditch in East London and it's like visiting a huge, uncurated, free-for-all exhibition. And nestled in amongst this hive of creativity sits an eponymously-named gallery run by one of the area’s artists, Pure Evil – or Charley Edwards to his friends.
Sitting at the eastern end of Leonard Street, the gallery is something of a street art treasure trove featuring a temporary exhibition space, a basement crammed full of archived work and even a secret recording studio that Edwards claims to be haunted by a guitar-playing ghost.
Pure Evil is a title with a diverse history: it’s been an artist, a clothing brand and a gallery. However, it all started with an oddly dressed boy fleeing his homeland of Wales. "I was kind of just a weird kid living out in the valleys of Wales dressing up like Simon Le Bon. I was the only New Romantic in the village and I left because I was sick of Iron Maiden kids trying to beat me up," explains Edwards. "I came to London and got into making clothes and skateboarding, so the two combined together got me into doing streetwear and that got me to California."
"In my last months at college I was skateboarding all the time. One day I was skating the Southbank in London, and I walked over to Trafalgar Square into a full on class war of the Poll Tax Riots. I just thought, 'screw this and screw the Conservatives. London is rubbish'," remembers Edwards. "I got a round trip flight to New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. When I was out, there I hooked up with a clothing label called Anarchic Adjustment that was bang into skateboarding, bmxing, UFOs and psychedelics. I didn't want to go back to boring old London, so I stayed and became their clothing designer. I got into screenprinting t-shirts, making stuff, listening to deep house and techno, snowboarding, making music and deejaying."
Eventually growing tired of the Cali sunshine and with a growing fondness for his home shores, Edwards returned to London in 2001 to find the street art scene exploding. Says Edwards: "I came back I saw people like Faile and Bast and Banksy, people who were doing work in the streets. I’d seen graffiti before but it was never something really that I’d ever kind of ‘got’ that much or ever really cared about. [I found] character graffiti like Twist in San Francisco more interesting. One night I just cut a stencil and went out and enjoyed the thrill of doing that." And so the artist Pure Evil came to the fore and Pure Evil Clothing was no more.
Charley Edwards AKA Pure Evil
Bang, bang.
But looking for a base for his work, he set up shop in the Pure Evil Gallery just over three years ago. At its core, there is a mantra that has remained unshaken through economic hardship and a serious bout of organisation: to exhibit artists work purely because Charley digs it. According to Edwards, there's no commercial slant and no other agenda apart from merely for the love of it. This mantra is summarised perfectly in the gallery’s new exhibition, 3. "It's not going to be just streety stuff, but whatever I get a feeling of euphoria from," says Edwards, going on to explain that the idea in part arose from the internet’s thumbnail culture. "If I’m looking for ideas or inspiration I can look through a Tumblr page that has 7000 images and just skim through it all. It’s like Tumblr in action."
Ultimately though, Edwards motivation for the gallery is that he's a street art magpie with an insatiable thirst for inspiration. It's an inspiration that can jump out at you from the most unlikely places. Says Edwards: "I think [street art is] something that you start to notice when you’re walking around. You’ll see a little symbol or a man on top of a building and you’ll start to wonder how it got there and why they decided to go up there. It’s that mystery that’s interesting. It’s also kind of a way of finding out who’s in town, like how a dog pees on trees then another dog comes along and sniffs the tree to see what dog was there earlier on."
So much art, so little space.
The back room.
It's not a typo.
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Indie Spotlight: Pure Evil Gallery (text) by is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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