Mat Collishaw  (born 1966, Nottingham, UK) is an artist based in London. Collishaw attended Goldsmiths College of Art, London

(198-69), alongside the likes of Damien Hirst and other prominent YBAs.He was represented for a time by the Lisson Gallery and had a relationship with Tracey Emin. His work uses photography and video. His best known work is Bullet Hole which is a close up photo of a bullet hole in a head, mounted on 15 light boxes. Since then is work has changed to deal with elements of fantasy and illusion - notably fairies. Mat Collishaw biggest break came in 1997 when he featured in the infamous ‘Sensation’ exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in London.

In ‘Sensation’, Collishaw displayed large scale tiled photographs of a bullet wound in a head; this work is a good indicator of Collishaw’s artistic interests and practices. He typically takes imagery which is at once shocking yet strangely beautiful in order to examine the beguiling nature of photography and the seduction of visual imagery. Collishaw uses contemporary images alongside techniques and styles which are reminiscent of much older art, for example he often utilises a mosaic effect which, while alluding to religious art and Ancient Rome, is also now associated with pixilated digital imagery. In this way Collishaw brings together a variety of connotations in one piece that is both traditional and contemporary; dichotomies of life and death and attraction and repulsion are central to Collishaw’s art which tests our natural responses to disquieting imagery when dressed as sacred, slick or stunning. Known most widely for his photographs and videos, Collishaw’s work now stretches to installation, drawing and painting. Much of his work contains historical and art-historical references to the interaction between nature and culture. Often the images are appropriated and digitally altered, the underlying theme being the relationship between representation and reality. The artist lives and works in London.

Who killed Cock Robin? is a digital collage of appropriated images. The title is taken from a children’s nursery rhyme or popular ballad. These rhymes frequently had hidden meanings and were a safe way of making critical comments on happenings of the day. In ‘Cock Robin’ the various human parts are taken by different birds. It has been suggested that it originated with the intrigues surrounding the downfall of the English government in 1742

One of the notorious young British artists included in shows like ''Brilliant'' and ''Sensation,'' Mat Collishaw drew attention when he was still in art school in the late 1980's for a greatly enlarged close-up photograph of a bloody head wound called ''Bullet Hole.'' Mr. Collishaw's new work is less blunt, but he still uses photographic media to theatrical, partly seductive and partly annoying effect.

The seductive half of this show features a six-sided structure with a Disney-ish pastoral landscape painted on the outside and peepholes through which one can view the video of a naked couple making love in an Edenic setting. Soothing music comes from a nearby piece, a video of an angelic woman playing the harp, which is projected into the mirror frame of an old vanity. In another work, the projected shadows of birds drift across the sky of a Chinese landscape folding screen.

From this pleasant, heavenly realm, you move to hell: a room whose deep red walls are hung with a series of large, illuminated three-dimensional photographs depicting staged scenes of the last days of Nazi officers in their bunkers. Each colour image shows a partly naked soldier and his sexy girlfriend, both dead from suicide or murder, in a basement room stocked with liquor, jewellery, silver and other loot.

These pictures are not particularly sensational: they look like theatre sets waiting for the play to begin.

What is irritating is yet another artist using Nazis in an attempt to give substance to an otherwise imaginatively underdeveloped idea. How about a moratorium on Nazis?

Mat Collishaw fuses antique and contemporary technologies in his unique strain of moving-image sculpture, as precious as it is provocative. His jewel-like projections mounted in Victorian frames evoke a curious and dark science while a giant projection of a baby illuminated by ultraviolet light (used to inhibit intravenous drug use from public lavatories) crosses boundaries between the aesthetically seductive and the morally reprehensible.

Throughout his career Collishaw has appropriated all manner of disturbing images - pornographic images, images of suicide victims, a close-up of a head wound inflicted by an ice pick. He states I'm interested in the way imagery hits me subliminally. ... Whether I like it or not, there are mechanisms within us that are primed to respond to all kinds of visual material, leaving us with no real say over what we happen to find stimulating. The type of adverts to be found on television and in glossy magazines are visually designed to have a power over the mind before they can even be questioned. The dark side of my work, primarily concerns the internal mechanisms of visual imagery and how these mechanisms address the mind.’

The new work produced for this show uses materials from differing eras such as contemporary video projections within antique frames and in the past Collishaw has juxtaposed modern technology with antique photographic equipment. He explains this as an attempt ‘to make you aware of the technology, from whatever era, and how all these gadgets are an attempt to hypnotise’ The new work uses projections of elements with which we all live, such as rain, fire, plants and insects - elements that require film or video technology because they’re about very small, imperceptible movement - and places them within elegant antique frames.Also part of the exhibition is a large scale projection of a baby, bathed in the ultraviolet light used in public conveniences to prevent drug users locating their veins. The juxtaposition of this drug culture with baby change facilities evokes ‘a highly primitive zone where small babies have protective, glowing white nappies and ultraviolet skin. It is as though they were somehow protected by the aura of customer relations - safe under a glowing light.’

Myths and legends have always been fertile ground for artists, and Mat Collishaw plunders their themes and imagery with style. Although making labour-intensive use of all the tricks available to the modern photographer, his images echo Victorian paintings - perhaps because the Victorians too were great fans of classical references and gothic fantasy. Sharing their interest in the unknowable and clandestine, Collishaw talks of the "genuine fear of things being out of control... the temptation of the unknown". And what could be more seductive (and more redolent of original sin) than a warped, ungovernable world where women fall in love with bulls and bratty fairies sit amidst our modern debris?
Collishaw’s video work incorporates antique furniture, leisure devices and technology as devices for expanding the allegorical implications of the digital image. These anachronistic props, specifically Victorian in vintage, are travellers from a period of time, like today, which experienced tremendous social, cultural and economic upheaval. This kind of change always brings about questions of valuation, morality and equivalence, and it is this ambiguous space in flux that Collishaw is interested in exploring.
This exploration often manifests itself in fantasias of the richness and beauty of violence; The Sorcerer, a beautifully carved Chinese room-divider becomes the projection screen for a tenderly coloured video of a mushroom cloud exploding against a dark sky. Conversely, in The Liar, an ornate wooden frame has been fit with a mirror and LCD screen on which a beautiful fantail dove slowly appears and disappears. The use of these old objects is regenerative, and this magic can enchant and irritate at the same time, as in The Idolater. Through the lens of an ancient projector, we can see a Chardin painting of a boy smoking a pipe made to blow real (video) bubbles.The notion of sex as mechanistic--familiar from such Dada artists as Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp--is pointedly demystifying and antiromantic, but the notion of sex as animalistic, while subject to the same rhetoric of disenchantment, is more a topos of popular culture than of avant-garde art: it tends to be used to exoticize and romanticize. In this piece the two came together: transgression was discipline, pleasure was productivity. Or, rather, one was the image and the other was the mechanism that set it in motion, though the former never camouflaged the latter. Collishaw's work implies a hidden interdependence between these two notions of sexuality. Tinged as it is, however, with a kind of unsentimental nostalgia, redolent of ancient myths in which gods assume animal form to mate with humans, the work's irony is less political than it is aesthetic. While Collishaw seems to be pointing to the ubiquity of these fictions--no matter how "critical"--at all levels of culture the implication here is not that they engage belief, but simply that they can't be shaken. Instead, there is the curious detachment with which, dreaming, one notes that one's experience is an illusion.

Young British Artists or YBAs  also Brit artists and Britart  a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.

Matt Collishaw Best in Me painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

30" x 40" canvas

R.R.P. £179.99

SALE Price £97

Mat Collishaw Corona Painting Sale on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

30" x 40" canvas

R.R.P. £179.99

SALE Price £97

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Antique and collectible toys

Collecting antique toys, from dolls, games, tin, teddy bears, and companies like Disney, Ideal, Barbie, and games fashioned from television shows, like Dark Shadows

Antique toys encompass a very wide range, including Dolls, Games, Tin Toys, and Teddy Bears, just to name a few. Among these are then other categories, broke down even more, often by a famous name or company, such as Shirley Temple or Disney. As wide a selection as there is, there are as many different types of collectors. Some who collect across the whole span of whatever they encounter, to those who only collect a certain type or name. Let us look at some of these categories so the beginning collector, or someone experienced, but looking to spread their collecting wings in a new direction, can develop a feel for what may be out there hiding in an undiscovered toy-box, corner of a dusty barn, maybe even their own attic.

Tin Toys

A longtime favorite of many collectors, toys made of tin were made in nearly every possible configuration. Airplanes, trucks and cars, animal shapes, people, even cartoon characters. Many of these were simple pull toys; others, elaborate, moveable specimens, such as a merry-go-round, complete with music. Also common among tin toys, were useable items, like sand pails and shovels, brightly decorated with wonderful summer scenes, including flowers, children playing, zoo animals, etc. All of these examples are very desirable, especially if found in good condition with little or no rust.

Teddy Bears

Manufactured Teddy Bears are not as old as some might think. First made in 1902 as a gift for the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, hence the name ‘Teddy’ -bear, they were also first made overseas at roughly the same time. Steiff, a German company, is a brand that many collectors look for today. Bears were often made of wool, mohair, felt, and stuffed with what was available, often sawdust. Jointed bears are a favorite, as are editions that had ‘growlers’ or noisemakers, inserted in them. A problem that new collectors run into when searching out authentic Teddy Bears, is telling the difference between reproduction teddy bears and authentic versions, as many companies that made bears and marked them, still make them today. Then, other bears that are worth collecting may never have been tagged at all. A good rule to keep in mind when collecting bears, or any item, is only collect what you find desirable, what you like, never collect for resale value, unless you are certain of what you are buying.

Games

Board games are top collectibles. One reason for this being that the games often depicted popular characters from television and the comics, including the likes of Dennis the Menace, GI Joe, Spider Man, Pink Panther, Captain Kangaroo, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Even adult theme shows, such as Dark Shadows and The Six Million Dollar Man, had games fashioned after them. Many of these same figures were also available in decks of cards, and finding a complete deck, still in it’s original wrapping, would be a good find. Board games are often not complete, as pieces are lost through the years, so again, finding a complete set would be an excellent find.

Dolls

Dolls are so varied that you will collections and specimens beyond your imagination. Baby dolls, walking dolls, German dolls, American manufactured dolls, and hundreds more of distinctions. Dolls have categories such as porcelain, china, bisque, or cloth. Sleeping dolls, animated dolls, or dolls that pee. Barbie and other Mattel dolls have a following all their own, as does Betsy Wetsy, by Ideal. The Ideal Company also produced such favorites as a Smokey the Bear doll, Wizard of Oz character dolls, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, and many others. Many companies, as advertisement for their products also issued dolls as premiums. An example of this is the Blue Bonnet Sue doll, or a white or a black, composition style doll, issued by the Mobil Company as a premium for gasoline purchases.

While these listings may seem like a lot to weed through, they barely touch the surface of toy collecting. Marbles, spin tops, trains, model boats, and automobiles, cap guns, miniature kitchen sets, child sized tools, and a never ending assortment of other adult items in child sized versions, are just more examples of what a huge selection is out there, waiting for you to start collecting. Toy collecting is a simple way to extend our pleasure of fun things into adulthood, and allowing us to have an excuse for needing ‘just one more Barbie’!