September 26, 2005
The Green House
by Liberation Iannillo
In Lydia Lunch’s bio, Paradoxia, the transgressive artist details her existence in the desolate wasteland that was SoHo during the early 1980s. Squatting in an abandoned building where the electricity had been turned off since Kennedy’s assassination, Lunch constructed bizarre set designs in the store front window using discarded mannequins, dead flowers and odd trash she would find on the street. Artists like Lunch are responsible for resurrecting the once shitty neighborhoods like SoHo and DUMBO, inhabiting them when even rats took off, and then building the ruins back up to something once again livable only to get the boot when the neighborhood begins to thrive. What a difference twenty years makes.
Today SoHo is occupied with German-like precision by Chanel, Prada and John Fluevog while DUMBO has been gobbled up by real estate whore Barbara Corcoran quicker than Courtney Love can down illegal Ambien. But hidden in plain sight on Green Street is a single building that has yet to succumb to the frenetic energy of the neighborhood. Instead of housing $300 shoes, the building is home to a small group of artists who, like Lydia Lunch, are just trying to exist and create.
Known by its occupants simply as the Green House, the graffiti covered building located 75 Green Street is now home to a handful of artists who hold weekly group shows. The building is owned by Sue Stein who resides on the top floor and it has been in her family for at least three generations. Over the years the structure has had many incarnations ranging from a carriage house to a clothing factory which was last operational sometime in the 1950s. For the past 50 years the grand space has elegantly decayed. With its 30 foot high ceilings, slightly shattered skylight and pock-marked cement walls, the main floor has all the opulence of a Bernardo Bertolucci film set, a seemingly appropriate venue for a group of young artists to move in and set up an impromptu art gallery.
Myles Emery, Jerry Foust, and Shelby Voice were the first artists who managed to finagle their way into the building. The three knew each other from an artist’s residence they shared on St. Marks Place known as The Cave. After a falling out with the space Shelby and Miles sold some paintings and moved to a hotel on James Street while Jerry set up camp outside the Green House. Jerry befriended Sue, the owner of the building, and convinced her to let him stay there after a number of his paintings were stolen while he slept on the sidewalk outside. When Shelby and Myles ran low on cash they left their hotel and joined Jerry in the space and together the three of them have turned the first floor into a revolving art gallery.
With unofficial openings each Friday night they have attracted a huge amount of attention with at least a dozen artists work on display. The crowd they attract ranges from bike messengers to art collectors who literally buy work off the wall. Haphazard lighting attempts to showcase the variety of work on display.
On one wall there is a seven foot portrait of Joan Crawford by Kate Hermanowski, on another wall there is a Roman-esque portrayal of the building’s façade by Frank Carreno which sits next to a television set broadcasting static with John Lennon’s portrait painted on it. Shelby’s pieces consisting of haunted figures painted on the back sides of framed glass are by far the standout pieces the collective has to offer.
The future of the space is uncertain. Though the owner refuses to sell out and give up the storefront for retail usage she is planning on renovating the location. At the very least the artists occupying the space have a few more months to continue their creative endeavors.
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September 19, 2005
Miss Van
Miss Van and the Power of the Pin-Up by Lauren Cerand
“I am doll parts/Bad skin/Doll heart” – Hole, Doll Parts
“I like it when it shocks people.” – Miss Van
It would make sense that an opening for an exhibition of the sexy, sloe-eyed, pretty girls packing some serious action and otherwise known as Miss Van’s poupées (“dolls”), would be…swelteringly, sizzling, hot. In more ways than one, naturally. Downtown denizens turned out in force for the debut of Don’t Be Shy at Jonathan LeVine gallery in Chelsea, where a fresh and fierce array of her twee temptresses is on display through October 8.
Now based in Barcelona, Miss Van earned her stripes on the streets of her native Toulouse – a city in Southwestern France that is home to a world-famous graffiti scene - where she set the standard for her peers and discovered an early affection for ruffling feathers.
The very moment that one’s gaze meets one of the slightly sinister, come-hither stares of les poupées, a frisson of pure sex seems to shimmy right up the canvas’s frame. With their old-fashioned pin-up poses and exposed flesh, they seem destined to become objects of scrutiny, if not obsession, as all exquisitely mysterious women invariably are. Miss Van encountered a certain amount of political censorship in her early experience painting in her native Toulouse, with one ardent objector blackening out the faces of her characters, and the scrawls of outraged feminists appearing elsewhere. She is careful to point out, though, that that criticism came from outside the graffiti scene, and that her freedom as an artist is central to her work: “I just want to express my fantasy.”
Although nearly inhuman in their delicate transposition of a certain dangerous cuteness, it’s impossible not to notice that les poupéesbear more than a slight resemblance to Miss Van herself. She recognizes it and even admits to a phase of “dressing like my dolls” that correlated with a period of living in a house decorated in all pink and being “a little bit obsessed” with the color in general.
An artist from a young age, Miss Van dedicated herself to art school and graffiti at the same time, and made no efforts to hide her love for street art from her professors. In the early 1990s, she began tagging and going around with friends. It was not long before she began to develop her trademark “sexy, erotic images that will disturb or seduce people on the street.” She likes to explore the symbiotic relationship between artist and public space, especially the fact that she can deposit images freely into a fully engaged environment and thereby encourage a heightened level of interplay between the viewer and her work.
She moved to Barcelona about a year ago – “the last place in Europe where it was cool to paint.” When she visits a new city, she tries to paint and indulge her urge to “leave something, like a memory; I was here.” Miss Van laments overly strict historic preservation codes in France that prevent graffiti artists from leaving their mark, as opposed to the U.S., where there are fewer rules governing private and public space. In the states for a few weeks this time around, she mentions that she is missing friends in Barcelona and her adopted way of life. She is homesick for her bicycle and a short ride down to the sea.
Miss Van has so far resisted the pressure to become a brand first and an artist second. Other than experimenting with a collaborative project for Fornarina, she seldom takes on projects outside the immediate sphere of her drawings and paintings. In a refreshing display of candor, she is not shy at all about her stance at the intersection between art and commerce, noting, “I don’t want to make so many products. I don’t want to become a brand. I am just an artist.”
Upcoming gallery shows in Los Angeles and Paris ensure that Miss Van’s work will be well represented in the art world, if not the marketplace by choice. And, of course, you never know what you’ll find around the corner or at the end of that forbiddingly dark alley. Watching, waiting - les poupées– and of course, whispering: don’t be shy.
On The Web | www.missvan.com
Lauren Cerand writes about art, politics and style in New York.
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September 12, 2005
Joe Heaps Nelson
by Liberation Iannillo
Opening this month at Zito Studio Gallery on Ludlow Street is an exhibit of new works by Joe Heaps Nelson in which the painter offers up subversive little slices of Americana.
Cheerleaders. Milk! Corn! Beef! Eggs! Pork! The jubilant teens proudly offer produce grown on their home turf. Bulldogs. Little friends with distorted faces that loyally sit at the end of the Barcalounger waiting for its owner to wake up from a carbohydrate induced coma and offer a little TLC. Highway rest stops. Filler’ up and while you are at it, get yourself a bacon, egg and cheese McGriddle! Mmm! Wooly mammoths…well, see for yourself. Joe Heaps Nelson’s view of American life is taken straight from the source. His imagery, derived from various sources ranging from old catalogues to photographs he has taken himself, is a window that reveals both the excitement and the banality of life in the heartland.
Nelson’s paintings are snapshots, captured memories from a not so distant past. The faux leather interior of a 1970s Chevy Nova. A father and son racing slot cars. A pissy younger brother in a Boy Scout uniform. Cheerful stewardesses welcoming you aboard. And of course, there are the cheerleaders. Nelson’s cheerleaders, a combination of Marcia Brady beauty and Juliette Lewis gawky are his trademark. He has painted many of them, over 100 to be exact. “I wanted overkill,” he says. “I wanted to make the cheerleader mine in the way Degas has his ballet dancers.” His dedication to the subject of cheerleading was so apparent that it got himself and friend Antony Zito kicked out of a high school football game in Illinois when the parents questioned his photographic interest in the pastime. “The grownups got nervous,” he says with a laugh.
Aside from the cheerleaders and the football players in the summer of their youth, Nelson’s work includes boxers ala Friday Night At The Fights, interpreted via the old black and white televisions most American families grew up with in the kitchen. Tractor trailers parked at a snowy rest stop in the Midwest, sans hookers or lot lizards. Western Landscape, which advertises the pre-mention McGriddle, is a perfect testament to the lack of creativity engineers have for our earth. The beautiful chunk of landscape is rudely interrupted with a fluorescent lighted Shell station, the parking lot that cuts into the foreground of the painting is “the final insult to the landscape,” says Nelson.
By taking the images out of their original context, Nelson’s paintings begin to shed the skin of America and expose the stereotypes that have been forced upon us. We celebrate our women when they take on traditional roles such as cheerleader, stewardess, and mother and we also love our muscle cars, but not when Shirley Muldowney is driving. For African Americans, the choices are limited to celebrated athlete or derelict in police custody. OJ Simpson can have his cake and eat it too.
Speaking with Nelson it is hardly his intention to be controversial. His approach to the subject matter is truly sincere, it is only when viewed as a collective that the bigger picture reveals itself. “I was always drawn to subjects that most people would consider too banal or commonplace to be an art subject. I always liked the idea of people thinking, ‘Who would want a painting of that?’, or more to the point, ‘Why would anybody paint that?’ I am an absurdist at heart.”
Joe Heaps Nelson
September 15th - November 15th, 2005
Zito Studio Gallery | 122 Ludlow Street | NYC
On The Web | www.joeheaps.com
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September 5, 2005
CUM*
by Liberation Iannillo
The artist collective known as CUM* have an approach to street art that would make Hustler Publisher Larry Flynt extremely proud. Finding their way onto the exteriors of very public buildings are wheat pasted images of coquettish brunettes flashing onlookers, women on their knees dishing out some oral, and preening pin-ups seducing passerbyers. Taken at face value, unsuspecting civilians might be offended by the nature of the work, perceiving it as nothing more than the continued exploitation of women. But in a time when mass media advertising is all too heavily borrowing from the porn industry, can fingers really be pointed at someone for crossing the line when the line itself is already so blurred?
Based in Ghent, Belgium, the trio known as CUM* have been making their “fucking erotic street art” for three years. Their work began with a stencil of a pin-up girl and has evolved, with a great deal of influence by the massive amounts of pornography readily available on the Internet, into a sexual free for all. Liberating the ladies from their computer monitor confines and setting them loose on the streets, CUM* was curious to see what would become of the girls when taken out of context. “In the beginning there was a group who would put tiny stickers on our work with a feminist slogan,” they say. “Sometimes w get anti-fan-mail, but overall we don't get a lot of negative response. A lot of ladies really like our work. We absolutely don't want to denigrate women, it is just a reflection of how women are portrayed in the porn industry and even in every day media.”
Originally a project slated just for the streets, CUM* has moved indoors where they have more artistic freedom to experiment with their explicit subject matter. Using a color scheme of mostly black, white and pink, silk screened images of the girl-next-door types are juxtaposed with drip-heavy spray painted stencils of Russ Myer looking women. On canvas, both the Madonna and the Whore are celebrated and they coexist side by side with neither camp passing judgment on the other. Try finding that on the street.
Working on the streets in Europe where people are a little less uptight about sexuality than they are in America, CUM* are still very much aware that they are breaking the law and that they would be the perfect fodder for a morality issue type court case. “Sex is everywhere, but since we started Cum* it became really obvious that there is still a taboo about this matter,” they say. “If you pay enough money you can put anything you want on billboards, magazines or TV, especially in Europe. Not that we mind that there are a lot of sexual images out there, it's just the hypocritical way in which people deal with it.”
On The Web | www.cuminthestreets.com
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