My Dog Sighs is probably Portsmouth’s most famous local artist, it would be fair to say. His artwork – his cans, his raindrops, his eyes especially, and an assortment of characters – can be found dotted around the city, as well as others far and wide. His style is distinctive, often melancholy, making use of discarded materials. If you like some of Tim Burton’s characters or Tool videos or the dystopic artwork associated with Scarfolk then there will be something to appeal to you in the work that My Dog Sighs creates.
We’ve met Paul, the artist, several times over the years when he’s been out and about producing pieces in the city or when he’s been gracious enough to throw open the doors to his studio. He’s a very approachable person and we love the style of artwork he produces so we jumped at the chance to take a look at a short-run exhibition he arranged to hold inside the former Grosvenor Casino & Ballroom in Southsea in the latter half of July, 2021.
This post is mainly a showcase of photography from our visit to the Inside art exhibition with a little of my own take on what I saw, which may not be in any way what My Dog Sighs intended. Hey, but that’s art, right?
We’ll start outside Inside, waiting to go inside Inside, and enjoying some of the street art that decorated the exterior of the building. You’ll find similar pieces from the artists responsible across much of this part of Portsmouth.
A quick aside before we get inside Inside to show off the interior of the building prior to My Dog Sighs getting permission to fix it up (a bit) and put on his art show. The video here was taken by some Urbex people in 2016 and actually shows the location in a better condition than that in which he found it. As he told me:
Wow. Hadn’t seen this. Sadly, by the time I got in, people had absolutely destroyed the place. Not a single mirror or window intact, all the sculptures smashed. Everything breakable was destroyed.
Covid precautions were in effect, with masks required and with limited numbers allowed to attend in timed slots to ensure everyone got 45 minutes to wander around and take in what they wanted to see on each of two levels. We started off on the upper level and the initial entry into the ballroom is sorely not given any of the justice it deserves in the photograph here.
You can get a sense of the atmosphere created by the ambient sounds and music, and the chatter of the limited number of visitors in this tiny video clip I took from two spots in this ballroom.
The previously-abandoned space plus the noises at the periphery of your senses plus the imagery all added up to an immersive art experience. What I got from this was an otherworldly wander through the mind of My Dog Sighs with representations of the artist’s life and inspirations, along with memories of the evolution of artwork. As a science fiction fan, both aspirational and dystopic flavours, I could easily imagine myself in an episode of some television series where characters are sent in to see what is affecting someone through a hologrammatic exploration of their dreams.
Larger pieces included a run-down playground area with colourful tent and broken shopping trolley and toys that could have been a memory of the formative years and appreciation for making things out of discarded items; at the opposite end of the room there was a depiction of the creator of the can people at work in a sea of empty cans under a couple dancing under the glitterball which felt like love inspiring procreation in a way.
Of course, I could be completely wrong. I didn’t ask Paul – although I could have; he was there, friendly, ready to talk to anyone – and I didn’t try to find out. I just wanted to see what I thought, which ties in quite nicely with that sci-fi hologram investigation. If I’m completely wrong then I’ll just claim that art is subjective and we push our own interpretations on things all the time so sue me. When that comes to art appreciation that perhaps only occasionally aligns with the artist’s original vision. I’ve watched enough art programmes to exclaim “What the hell are you talking about!?” when some historian describes some convoluted interpretation of a piece that I feel it’s only fair I give it a go at being on the receiving end myself.
A perhaps easier-to-grasp series of pieces were the famous eyes of My Dog Sighs. From entering the ballroom the left-hand wall looked to be a clear progression of improvements in examples of these pieces of art, on different materials, increasingly detailed, increasingly cleaner, all sporting differences in the silhouetted reflections capturing a snapshot of where and when they were formed. From wood the eyes moved through concrete and metal towards the final piece in the corner of the room, in canvas, and titled Inside.
I won’t try to interpret every piece here because there are limits to my imagination and, besides, isn’t the point of art for you to see your own thing and come to your own conclusion, and tell the artist “Oh, really? No, I didn’t see that at all? Are you sure you’ve not got that wrong?” when he or she patiently explains how they have tried to convey emotions and thoughts in a visual medium.
A nest-like structure holding seed pods was a popular spot for people to sit opposite and gaze into. Given that I considered us to be inside My Dog Sighs’ mind, it felt to me that we were looking to the outside world through the back of an eyeball to ideas being born. Again, probably waaaay off the mark.
We had three quarters of an hour on that level of the building, soaking up the atmosphere, roaming the inner space several times to see if we could see something we’d missed, enjoying being around other people totally engrossed at the pieces on display.
We descended a set of stairs to get to the next level of the building. Portraits of My Dog Sighs were at the stairwell’s entrance to each floor, both of them showing him pressed up against glass and staring at us. As we were Inside, were we looking out at the artist looking in, trying to see if we liked what we’d seen as we headed down? Or were these versions of the artist trapped in the Phantom Zone, sent into exile for crimes we can only guess at? I’m guessing the former is more likely, but who knows the real reason?
The walls down the stairs were decorated with art, but you knew they would be.
The first section of the second level of the Inside art exhibition was akin to a more standard art gallery. Framed pieces on walls, including a large triptych, plus sculptures mounted on pillars. I wondered if this was a nod to people who perhaps hadn’t got the upper floor, or perhaps to people like me who’d got it all wrong. I also wondered if this was a bridge; this might have been the first idea for a show but one which was superseded by the wondrous dreamscape we’d already wandered through. It might simply have been a nice place to display some artwork. It was a nice place to display some artwork.
From there we entered the Mind Maze. This was a claustrophobic labyrinth featuring blind turns and mirrors, every surface decorated with older pieces of art, prints of eyes, copies of adverts that had been run in the local paper, statements, and flyers. The things that had led to the birth of the main show. Coloured arrows provided a way to move around the maze in a set way if you chose to do so and there was a room with chalk boards covering the walls and coloured chalk with which you were free to leave your own mark. Some interactive fun for kids, no doubt, but also for adults because of course we had to write something. We walked through, we stopped often as we came face-to-face with others coming another way, we backed up, we pointed down other corridors, we enjoyed seeing kids of other visitors stopping to take photos of anything and everything.
There were a couple of rooms off from the maze, blocked from entry, but allowing you to look down into them. I particularly liked the deer sculpture that seemed frozen in torchlight, seemingly caught in the middle of something nefarious. No wonder that room was boarded up from the main part of the maze.
From the gallery or the maze the exit was, naturally, through the gift shop area. This was still decorated with art on the walls and on window sills.
And that brought our look through the My Dog Sighs Inside art exhibition to a close. The photos here don’t do it justice, and I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know by mentioning that my writing won’t have helped. However, Strong Island have documented the installation and interviewed the artist himself, and are in the process of wrapping up and editing video footage as I write this, so keep an eye out for that when it appears and maybe things will become clearer.
Great post. I think one of your other posts mentions this artist as well. Starting to really like this stuff. Ellie & I recently saw My Dog Sighs pieces at the fabulous Moments exhibition at Moyse’s Hall in Bury St Edmunds.