^{I went to art school. Had two sold-out shows in a Chelsea NYC gallery and sold work to some of the most renowned art collectors in the world. Gave it all up to give out free tampon cases on the street instead. Who wouldn’t?}

ABOVE: Articulated cardboard assemblies. Freestanding and wall mounted.

ABOVE: A watercolor series loosely exploring imagined dynamics between the artists Lizzie Fitch, Ryan Trecartin and their relationships to their previous gallerists Andrea Rosen and Elizabeth Dee.

ABOVE: Paper and X-acto blades

Trials and Tribulations of a Cottage Industry, Kravets/Wehby Gallery, circa 2000, C-Prints in foam frames

STUDIES OF A NAVAJO WOMAN TRICKSTER

There are times in NYC, upon exiting a mesmerizing performance of any sort, when one is certain that the experience they just witnessed was the best offering to be had in the entire city on that given night. Tall order to be sure, but sometimes you just know. I’ve had a few, including: performance artist and vocalist Ivo Dimchev orchestrating a masterful Lars Von Trierian audience manipulation live on stage while wearing nothing but a wig, high heels, and a transparent orange taffeta robe; nearly every performance by dance choreographer Sarah Michelson; Just Two Dancers performed by the choreographers Jon Jasperse and Juliette Mapp at Dancespace; the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion whipping a packed ballroom into a frenzy (spiked by the random inclusion of Fred Schneider of the B52’s); the Fischer-Spooner meta-musical, multi-night extravaganza performed at Deitch Projects warehouse gallery space; as well as the blitzkrieg of Karen O and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs more than once.

Add to these the largely unheralded brilliance of Mike Iveson, in character as Nurse Vendetta K Star performing her piano bar routines in second-hand theater spaces downtown. Resplendent in a bloodied nurse smock, Vendetta would work through her latest songbook between musings and audience engagements. Piercingly hysterical. On one occasion Vendetta K Star was accompanied by a large, heavily made up (masking a full mustache) and colorfully costumed entity introduced as the Navajo Woman Trickster. The NWT sat off to the side of the mini grand and bantered with Vendetta between songs — like a talk show sidekick–all the while fastidiously working on needlepoints of wolves to be made available for sale after the show. Andy Kauffman meets Liberace meets Bigfoot.

The confidence of these two legendary downtown performers to deftly pull off this fully realized absurdist coordination– for an audience of maybe thirty people–without breaking a sweat, represented, to me at least, a restructuring of what constituted success for any given artistic expression. I began incorporating the Navajo Woman Trickster into most of my artworks from then on to enforce adherence to core tenets.

Sarah Michelson’s Shadowman Tour T-Shirt printing by the Navajo Woman Trickster (a.k.a. Hapi Phace, the legendary NYC performance artist and prop maker) 2010, enamel paint on coated paper painter tarp, 9′ x 12′