BigShinyThing

According to the authorities, eight of the 10 suspects shown on billboards in the Kansas City, Missouri, area have been arrested, seven of them because of the billboards. But the ads raise legal concerns for Marc Mezibov, a defense attorney in Cincinnati, where the city’s first wanted billboard was went up recently.

If a client’s face and name were posted on billboards ascribing some horrendous crime to him, I would certainly raise issues with the court about whether he could receive a fair trial

he said, adding that he might request the trial be moved.

Police in the UK are already copying the FBI’s legendary ‘most wanted’ site: maybe it’s only a matter of time before we see posters like these on the side of the no. 38 bus.

CNN has the full story.

CutUp have a new exhibition opening on 4th November, at Seventeen – 17 Kingsland Road, E2. They’re clearly not anti-corporate enough to refuse sponsorship for the show from Leffe…

Bigger photos are available on our Flickr photostream.

BigShinyThing wrote about Speto a while back. Marrying his visually arresting style to the Brahma brand is pretty smart. What’s not so cunning is putting the logo in a place where piqued street art fans can paper over it… Debranded Brahma/Speto poster spotted on the Kingsland Road (the logo is under the flyposter in the bottom right hand corner). Great ad for Speto though…

On a similiar theme: David Batchelor’s Found Monochromes of London, a mesmerising slideshow featuring hundreds of blank rectangles. Until 24 October 2005, Londoners can catch more of Batchelor’s work on the platform at Gloucester Road tube station, as part of the Platform for Art initiative.

In a similar vein: Delete!, which a BST reader kindly reminded me about [via Wooster]. Artists Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf were allowed to cover all the advertising signage, logos and company names on Neubaugasse, a Viennese shopping street, in a monochrome yellow fabric.

Photos of both Monochromes and Delete! are below.

He also takes photos of billboards on billboards (pictured). And ladies with shopping trollies, and cashpoints, and people wearing pink.

A portfolio of his London work and photos in Russia and elsewhere is available on his site. He is also featured in this month’s edition of iD Magazine.

Situationist graphic design collective CutUp feature in this week’s Design Week:

…CutUp, a group led by ‘J’, a recent graduate in graphic design from Camberwell College of Arts. Critical of the way advertising has come to dominate our visual space, this collective of four is attempting to disrupt and raise awareness of the ‘colonisation of public space’ by reconfiguring billboards.

By stealth of night, members of the group cut up large-scale outdoor posters, out of which they then create a new image, which they hope will give the public pause for thought about the nature of the images that are being imposed upon them.

CutUp searches hoardings, carefully selected for tonal values, a quiet location and low positioning, and then carefully removes the posters. These are then cut up into a patchwork of little squares, numbered and scanned into a computer. The squares are reworked into a new image, which is then secretly and painstakingly replaced on another billboard.

Of course, slicing up and reordering expensive advertising is illegal, and CutUp could face prosecution for criminal damage. The group is currently working on a series of four ‘reordered’ billboards in London’s Shoreditch, to co-incide with an exhibition of its work at the Kemistry Gallery.

CutUp’s first piece, in 2003, was a reordering of a Nicorette billboard, transformed by collage to show the haunting, shy smile of murdered child Damilola Taylor. ‘It is the power of the billboard rather than the brand that we are trying subvert,’ says ‘J’.

Cut Up Show runs from 5 April to 30 April at Kemistry Gallery, 43 Charlotte Road, Shoreditch, London EC2A