My Dog Sighs street art
My Dog Sighs has been delivering street art projects for over a decade. He’s often left art on the streets for free during this time whether it’s paste ups and stencils on walls or up cycled crushed spray pain cans it’s always a joy to find a piece despite his often melancholy style. Eyes often feature in his work, unervingly looking at you whilst you look at them.
MyDogSighs explained his somewhat unusual moniker to Allinlondon: “I started doing street art about 10 years ago – I came a bit late into it, I had a family and kids and I was teaching at the time. I stumbled across art that was going on at the time and thought ‘I want a bit of this’. But, I was absolutely paranoid that I might get caught and lose my job so I needed something that had absolutely nothing to do with me. Nearly 20 years before that, while I was on holiday somewhere, someone had scrawled on a door – just with a pen – ‘My dog sighs’ and I just thought, ‘What a random thing to write’. It stuck with me. It was a purely random phrase I chose.”
The can above was one of a series exhibited at Nelly Duff as part of a solo show by My Dog Sighs at the gallery. The project was explained at the time: “The weapon of choice for street artists in the 1980’s, Krylon spray paint, established in 1947, held just as much significance in Martha’ Cooper’s cult book ‘Subway Art’ as the artists it featured. Having come into possession of a range of vintage spray cans, My Dog Sighs’ attention to detail and passion for reimagining materials has resulted in the transformation of beautiful objects into exceptional artworks that embolden and underline their individual stories. His signature eye pieces too follow in the same vein, with each iris featuring street artists and figures from Cooper’s iconic photographs, once more playfully and skilfully demonstrating the complexity of the relationship between the artwork and viewer.
In 2021 My Dog Sighs announced his most ambitious solo show to date – ‘INSIDE – We Shelter Here Sometimes’. My Dog Sighs explained the concept in more detail on his website:
‘Inside’ opens this summer. A fully immersive installation in an as yet undisclosed location in Portsmouth.
This is my most ambitious project to date, spending over a year transforming a derelict building into an immersive world inhabited by my ‘Quiet Little Voices’.
When I first stumbled into Street art, the artists were often perceived as ghosts, with only the results of their endeavours visible to the world.
With this project I take my quiet little voices and shift the the narrative what is understood by ‘My Dog Sighs’. No longer is My Dog Sighs the scruffy guy with a bedraggled Mohawk the artist you thought, but, by entering ‘Inside’ you’re able to catch a glimpse of a new, alternative, world.
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