When video art takes to the streets of London, using astronauts and Elon Musk as inspiration

Drew impressed at The Whitechapel, Somerset House, and in an excellent exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum part of the Unconscious Archives festival; now his work is coming to the streets of Islington, North London, where he’s showing  Incantation to rid this place of cars, without the help of Elon Musk (Essex Road Dub).

This is the fourth incarnation of the Tintype commissions, which each year see a number of artists create video pieces to be screened in the shop’s window, each of which is inspired by Essex Road itself, a long and strange street that’s clearly proved rich artist fodder.

Alongside Drew, local artist Richard Wentworth has created a piece through walking the streets and discovering “making impromptu observations, and unearthing the many lost bits of information that a city offers”; while Chloe Dewe Mathews’ responds to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut research phase, which saw the director catalogue the streets of Islington, such as  Upper Street, Camden Passage and St John’s Street, which inform the fictionalised version of Manhattan he later built at Pinewood Studios. Another classic cinema-inspired piece will be on show from Xiaowen Zhu, whose work titled Brief Encounters on the Milky Way documents the life of an astronaut on Essex Road.

The other artists in the show are Edwin Ashton, Judith Goddard, Matthew Noel-Tod and Paul Tarragó. The screenings will take place in Tintype’s window on Essex Road, London, from 8 December until 13 January, daily 4-11pm.