NYLON - February 2009 - (Page 120) radar: “karl lagerfeld” “giant dorothy” “david bowie” temporary insanity artist dawn mellor desecrates pop icons from the wizard of oz’s dorothy to david bowie. come over to the dark side. by samantha gilewicz. photographed by a. burger IN 1985, DISNEY’S Return to Oz found a post-traumatic Dorothy at the mercy of electro-shock therapy, a pontificating chicken, a witch with 31 transposable heads, and a deranged gang of humanoids with wheels for hands and feet. This quasisequel made the original’s nefarious flying monkeys look like cuddly chimps, but it’s got nothing on S&M cabaret performer–cum–painter Dawn Mellor’s surreal, fairytale-skewering artwork that is an incendiary trip down the yellow brick road. “As a child, The Wizard of Oz meant much the same to me as it did to other children: colorful escapism,” says Mellor, who grew up in Manchester, England, before earning an M.A. from the Royal College of Art in London, the city in which she’s currently based. “I remember the excitement when Dorothy opened the door to Oz, but I wasn’t one of those girls who dreamed of beiwng a princess or having sparkly shoes. I really hated Glinda the Good Witch and Toto. I loved the Wicked Witch. It was depressing when Dorothy was back on the farm….” In “Giant Dorothy”—one of her large-scale, oil-paint-clotted works now on display in Mellor’s self-titled exhibition at the Migros Museum in Zurich—Dorothy kneels before a crystal ball displaying her homestead. Innocent enough, were the Kansan ingenue not endowed with a blue Gingham boner puncturing the orb. Throughout the show, Mellor depicts the cult heroine in apocalyptic and orgiastic environs, from Oz to Iraq, casting her as a slave trundling a wheelbarrow full of gold bricks, an emancipator leading an army of zombies in gold bikinis, and a victim of war. In the latter, her eviscerated body lies in the wreckage of a bombed-out building, impaled by a sign that reads THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME. The character is still emblematic—just no longer of sterile, small-town America. “Dorothy is a tool for me,” says Mellor. “I wanted to mock the contemporary news media, so I reinvented her as a symbolic migrant and placed her in various human tragedies. It is not clear if she is a victim of, or responsible for, the violence.” The artist, an open lesbian, is likewise more satirical than sadistic in her exploration of Dorothy as a pervasive gay archetype, her take on the “friend of Dorothy” euphemism. “Surrender Dorothy,” for instance, renders Mellor’s muse “a queer fundamentalist” embroiled in an affair with the possessed child from The Exorcist. Explains Mellor: “She typifies notions of exile, innocence defiled through alcoholism and drugs, and gay male camp.” And Dorothy isn’t alone in the macabre makeover. In “Vile Affections,” Mellor’s salon-style series of subversive celebrity portraits also shown in the Zurich exhibition, the artist reworks the stories behind film, fashion, music, and political idols. “I used to draw a lot of ’80s pop stars as a teenager—Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince—that’s when I learned how easy it was to make something laugh-out-loud awful with seemingly worthy intentions,” she says. “So I invented [for myself] a psychotic stalker fan with a Messiah complex who enjoyed imagining celebrities suffer cruel humiliations.” Mellor, in kind, depicts David Bowie with an eyeball gouged out, Audrey Hepburn with her lips chewed off, Nicole Kidman growing a beard, and Karl Lagerfeld covered with cockroaches. Chloë Sevigny and Chase Crawford, you’re on her hit list, too. “I surprise myself,” says Mellor, of her ghoulish creations. “I never set out to shock the viewer. But if the work is shocking I hope there’s enough humor in it to be psychologically disturbing.” 120 032
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.