D-Face

D*Face is one of the most prolific urban artists from Britain. Dean Stockton, better known as D*Face, is a multimedia street artist who uses spray paint, stickers, posters, and stencils. He is most famous for his murals that critique the modern world, in particular, consumerism and the American Dream.

His aim is to encourage the public not just to ‘see’, but to look at what surrounds them, reflecting the fascination with celebrity, fame, consumerism, and materialism, re-thinking, reworking, and subverting imagery drawn from a refuge of decades of materialistic consumption, imagery appropriated from currency, advertising, comic books, these now iconic motifs, cultural figures, and genres are subverted to comment upon our conspicuous society.

D*Face's beginnings in the world of art were quite unusual: "What now seems like a lifetime but is merely a decade ago I sat slumped at my desk, head on arm pushing a pencil round a piece of paper dreaming up ways to kill time and break the chains holding me to my desk, Monday to Friday each day became the same and I was eating my brain. Then one day whilst dreaming up further ideas in the series of ‘Ways to kill time’ the pencil lines on the pad started to become characters, strange and dysfunctional they formed my dysfunctional world which had no rule. Slowly I figured the pencil could be replaced with a marker pen (the Pentel N50 to be exact) and the paper replaced with cheap vinyl which was acquired from DIY stores, these characters once resigned to a life on paper filed in a folder under ‘Not suitable for visual consumption’ began to have a life of their own; adhered to lamp post and electrical boxes they plotted and linked my route home, one became 10 and slowly 10 became more than I can remember. Each evening and as much of the day as I could rob was spent drawing and cutting out stickers. Stickers became posters, posters became more ambitious and somewhere in between I quit my job or maybe that was I got fired, either way the inevitable had happened. Like a river cuts it’s own path, I’d cut mine."