A PINK lollipop has fallen to the ground in London, smashing a miniature Audi convertible no bigger than a lego brick. The car’s tiny owner stands next to the crumpled vehicle, holding his hand to his head in distress. In Hong Kong, a little man in a shirt and tie prepares to leap off a skyscraper balcony. A pool of blood surrounds a mini-man crushed under a human boot in Moscow’s Gorky Park.
These little marvels are the work of Slinkachu, a London-based artist and photographer. Slinkachu, whose real name is Stuart Pantoll, takes a quiet approach to street art: instead of wielding spray cans on city walls, he uses train-set figurines and props to create miniature installations in pavement cracks, on bits of litter, and between other pieces of urban flotsam. The miniature people in these scenes work, fall in love, go shopping, express aspirations, play sports, and occasionally die. Slinkachu’s work is small, but its scope is large.
After working mostly in Britain since 2006, Slinkachu has recently been taking his little people travelling. A new book, “Global Model Village: The International Street Art of Slinkachu”, documents his urban scene-setting in Cape Town, Athens, Beijing and elsewhere. A photography exhibition of his new work opened last week at London’s Andipa Gallery and will be followed by more shows and events in New York, Berlin and Tokyo.
Slinkachu says he came up with the idea of using small figures while working as an art director on an ad campaign. He then started pursuing the idea on his own. The minuscule work contrasts sharply with that of well-known street artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey, who have for years been painting easy-to-spot images on the sides of buildings. Because of the tiny scale of the work, it is easy to walk past Slinkachu’s people without noticing them. They are also ephemeral—easily swept away or stepped on. Hence the photographs. He shoots close-up tableaux of the scenes, complemented by wide-angle, contextual shots that show the public space in which it was placed.