Click below to view work in the exhibition.

http://www.jasonclaylewis.com/gold

Drop Dead Gorgeous
October 9 – November 9, 2008

31GRAND
143 Ludlow St.
New York, NY 10002 (Bowery)
212.228.0901
hours: Wed. – Sun. 12-7pm
gallery31grand@earthlink.net
http://www.31grand.com

Jason clay lewis
drop dead gorgeous

October 9 – Npvember 9, 2008
31GRAND is pleased to present Jason Clay Lewis’s Drop Dead Gorgeous. Empathy/apathy, desire/revulsion, poison/panacea, death/life, religion/blasphemy: Drop Dead Gorgeous distills these binaries into Poison/Religion, pushing the boundaries between them. Which is good? Which is bad? Are these judgments even possible?

The poison pieces reference Empathy: as we go up the food chain, our empathy increases until we reach the ultimate form represented by the Crucifixion. Lewis’s fascination with religious topoi—seen throughout his work—this time focuses on semiotic ambivalence of Christian iconography. “d-CON Mary,” a recognizable form covered in rat poison packaging and prominently displayed bar codes, questions not only the innocuousness of religion but also the commercialization of religious iconography.

The motif of the skull has reoccurred throughout Lewis’s work, appearing in works ranging from the contemplative Ikebana sculptures, to the death’s head pin-up girl paintings, to the horrors of war as seen in the Torture Panel paintings. Hyperfeminized and seductively posed pinups are topped by bare skulls—a disjunction that causes an abrupt cessation of panting adolescent desire. However, despite its aura of death and horror, the skull also recalls and reaffirms life: if Death were one of these golden haired seductresses, who would be afraid?

Jason Clay Lewis came to New York in 1991 on a scholarship and internship at Universal Limited Art Editions. From 1992 – 1994 he worked with Jasper Johns as his personal studio assistant. Continuing his education, he graduated from The Cooper Union with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1997. Jason has been actively showing for the last several years both nationally and internationally. His work has appeared and reviewed in publications including Art In America, World of Art, Art On Paper and The Los Angeles Times.

“As an artist, my approach has always been, intentionally, to confound and challenge attempts to make things fit into what we already know and think. I strive to question perceived beauty, passion, life, death, and creation. I have an urgent conviction that art is a passionate and essential affair, a matter of life and death, where one senses the only response to death is art. Without glossing over the violence of the natural world I ask questions about man’s suicidal folly, the one we call progress, a merger into a religion of commerce and profit, of false facades, and using a strategy to make us reconsider our world of visual imagery. I tinker with these visual explanations, trying to give them purpose, direction, and meaning. Always perfectly aware that knowing this constant probing does not have a sequence to a perfect solution. Atypical and fascinating, as an adventurer blending expression, analysis, and experience, I use every means and media available to explore the love of knowledge and depict limits, while trying to push those limits even farther. My interest in unique materials helps to develop my ideas of attraction verses repulsion allowing my work to have both a strong visceral feeling while maintaining a direct cerebral presence.”

Jason currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

d-CON Mary 2008, d-CON packaging, fiberglass, 61 1/2″ x 24″ x 18″

Kittredge Cherry is brilliant.

Thanks for the Kittredge Cherry link, I’ve bookmarked that site.

Pagans wouldn’t have a problem with a chocolate Cernunnos (complete with manly assets) – you only have to look at the Cerne Abbas Giant. In fact Pagans would be queuing up to see a chocolate Cernunnos (but I couldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t get eaten…) How about a chocolate Dionysos? He was ritually eaten, according to legend.

Kittredge Cherry has some groovy LGBT-friendly depictions of Jesus on her websites, blog and book, Art that dares.

Moyers presses on, asking whether she was offended by Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a work which, he claims, “denigrates the central figure of your faith.” Again, she begs to differ. While advancing her opinion that Serrano is “not a very gifted young man, but he’s trying to do his best,” Sister Wendy absolutely refuses to see Piss Christ as blasphemous. Instead she reads it as an admonitory work that attempts to say “this is what we are doing to Christ.”

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n7_v86/ai_21113230/pg_2

I’d also point out that “dung” and “piss” are referred to in the King James Bible, Isaiah 36:12:

“But Rabshakeh said, Hath my master sent me to thy master and to thee to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men that sit upon the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?”

The argument that “artists should use symbols from another religion” only makes sense if those artists have a deliberate intention of acting blasphemously. They can then be accused of singling out Christianity for abuse. That wasn’t Cosimo Cavallaro’s intention, nor was it Serrano’s or Chris Offili’s. The argument also doesn’t travel very far. A chocolate Jesus upset some Christians but a chocolate Ganesh doesn’t upset Hindus:

“A 11-foot high Ganesh idol, made of 15,000 chocolate cubes and 15,000 Gems chocolate tablets, at Tulsi Building in South Mumbai during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival on Monday.” Picture: http://www.tribuneindia.com/2003/20030902/biz.jpg

And if you want a chocolate Buddha, just go here:

http://www.chocolatedeities.com/deity.php?deity=chocolate_buddha

Or a Star of David:

http://www.chocolatedeities.com/deityl.php?deity=david

There aren’t any recognisable symbols in Islam since symbolism of any form is proscribed. As I said above; it’s the symbol that counts in a work of art, not any cheap intention to offend.

“Most of the nudities were painted over, first by Michelangelo’s pupil, Daniele da Volterra, who thereby won for himself the nickname ‘il brachetonne’ or the ‘breeches-maker’.”

Michelangelo by Ludwig Goldschneider (Phaidon, 1953).