If All Hallows' Eve can't get here quickly enough for you, a trip to see Francine Spiegel's Mud And Milk at Deitch Projects might help you get your fright on. The RISD grad and upstate New York-based painter amalgamates "imagery from monster magazines, horror films, or her own performances" creating Frankenstein-esque canvases and female subjects resembling "gory super-heroines" (from press release).
To create some of the imagery incorporated into the seven paintings in Mud and Milk, Spiegel enlisted ten friends and fellow artists to costar alongside her in a goo-filled, slimy, messy performance she choreographed and staged at Deitch. Judging from the large-scale photos documenting the performance currently on view in the front of the Deitch space on Grand Street, Spiegel and her volunteers had the mother of all food fights including: "10 pounds of grits, 5 jugs of pancake syrup, 10 squirt bottles of grape jelly, 5 bottles of Pepto-Bismol, 20 buckets of tempura paint, 20 cans of whipped cream; plus silly string, shaving cream, Fruit Loops, flour, Kool-Aid, glitter, pie, marshmallow Fluff, fake arms, fake blood and chocolate syrup."
This list of ingredients was not arbitrary - Spiegel selected these items for her performance based on information she gathered from "Fangoria Magazine's behind-the-scenes horror movie ingredients" and food fetish websites. As the exhibit's press release states, "Taking the ingredients out of the male-manipulated world of porn and using them to make feminine and feminist works of art, Fran's results were somewhere between the erotic and the horrible." Being OCD, I didn't see the eroticism in the pictures of women thickly covered in multiple layers of ick, though I did see the B-movie horror aspect. The final paintings are disturbing and frightening but also a bit cheeky. And though the women from the performance who made it into the final paintings may look a frightful mess, they look nothing like victims - a welcome twist on the traditional horror/slasher flick stereotype of female characters. Learn more at Deitch.com and read a Q&A with Spiegel at villagevoice.com. Through October 31st.
Francine Spiegel, Alderville, 2009
Francine Spiegel, Midnight, the stars and you, 2009
Francine Spiegel, Nellie, 2009
Francine Spiegel, Westworld, 2009
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