Ever since first seeing Sonic Youth's 1990 Kool Thing video on 120 Minutes on MTV (remember that show?), I've harbored a girl-crush on Kim Gordon. The singer, musician, mother, writer, fashion designer, and filmmaker is also an artist. The Noise Paintings, a series of works on canvas and paper that exhibit Gordon's "recent explorations using paint, lyrics, and personal catch phrases to create a collision of the verbal and the visual" (from show's press release) is currently on view at Upper East Side art gallery cum bookseller John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz.
Gordon, a graduate from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, presents a series of white canvases emblazoned with black text scrawled in dripping, bleeding acrylic paint spelling out "lyrics and personal catch phrases" and names of bands. According to the show's press release, "They are like personal mantras, surfacing repeatedly at moments of creative charge and expression. Based on the names of noise bands, there is a sense of homage as well as obsession. From the provocative (16 Bitch Pile Up) to the banal (Wet Hair) by way of the more obscure (Sudden Oak), in The Noise Paintings the words find a new unique form each time the artist commits them to a surface."
The cozy two-story space housed in an uptown brownstone also displays some of Gordon's personal items that served as inspiration for the series including a wooden shelf filled with husband Thurston Moore's cassette tapes, pictures of their daughter, a Lonely Doll book by Dare Wright, zines, art books, Raymond Pettibon works, and shelves of albums by primarily female performers including Marianne Faithfull, Deborah Harry, Patti Smith, Francoise Hardy, and Joan Jett. Gordon's minimal canvases resemble a mix of graffiti, Asian ink drawing, and abstract painting and much like the artist, exude an alluring coolness and insouciance. Learn more at Johnmcwhinnie.com, papermag.com and refinery29.com. Through May 8th.
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