Nylon - October 2008 - (Page 109) trash and burn ARTIST AUR SCHMIDT’S EL WORK IS FULL O CREEPY-CRAWLI F ES CIGARETTE BUTT , S, AND OTHER WONDERFU THINGS. BY L SAMANTHA GILEWICZ. PHOTOGRAPHED BY JEFF HOLLAD AY On the industrial fringe of Long Island City, Queens, Deitch Studios casts an austere shadow over the waterfront. Inside, artist Aurel Schmidt is hard at work preparing for her first solo show, “Man Eater,” at Deitch Projects in SoHo. She has a perfect view of the Manhattan skyline, but has wallpapered her studio with pictures of insects and banana peels, rust-colored pheasant feathers and, in miniature mounds on the floor, is collecting the things she likes to draw: cigarette butts, acrylic nails, and condom wrappers. An armchair-sized tampon is slumped in one corner. Considering that Schmidt published a book of drawings last fall entitled Burn Outs, which employed cigarette burns strategically placed on the paper, I ask if she smoked all of the cigarettes herself. “Nooo, but I have the funniest story!” she says. “I had this group show in Athens [Greece], “Mail Order Monsters,” and I told the gallery interns that I needed hundreds of cigarette butts. One of them came up to me later and was like, ‘Um, we’re all getting sick from taking so many drags.’ I felt so bad!” Schmidt laughs, and her wide blue eyes crinkle up behind thick-rimmed glasses. She has choppy, straw-colored bangs and, wearing high-waisted white shorts, looks like Scarlett Johansson’s and Thora Birch’s characters in Ghost World rolled into one; she is both unapologetically nerdy and apologetically pretty. Schmidt’s artwork is its own brand of bizarre: Her intricate drawings are filled with zombies and malformed Mr. Smiley faces—with features cast from half-eaten hamburgers and lo mein, dead snakes and houseflies (“in art history, flies are symbols that everything beautiful dies”), and, more recently, penises (“at some point I started having sex!”). “When I first moved to New York a couple years ago I felt really alienated,” says Schmidt, who’s originally from Kamloops, British Columbia. “I was very aware of the rats everywhere and rotting garbage, and I became obsessed with the idea that I was turning into some kind of half-dead person. I would get home after days of drinking and doing drugs and draw in bed, hungover.” Using only colored pencils, Schmidt, who is self-taught, juxtaposes a naturalistic technique with nightmarish themes: each strand of hair and charred cigarette is rendered so painstakingly real that it appears to actually be sitting atop the paper, but they combine to paint a grislier picture still. In one drawing, entitled “Lynda” (an homage to sculptor Lynda Benglis, who controversially posed with a dildo in a 1974 issue of Artforum), a face simpers with phallic lips; in another, flies spell out BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME. “There’s an underlying darkness to everything,” Schmidt says. “But I think now that I’m happier, there’s more humor in my work.” Schmidt has exhibited around the world, often as part of Tim Barber’s Tiny Vices art crew, and for her show at Deitch, is making her own pencil-andpaper interpretations of de Koonings and Picassos. “It’s not like I’m trying to make this conceptual show; I’m just so in love with the work, I can’t help but want to make it,” she says. “A painter couldn’t redo a Jackson Pollock drip painting, but because I draw, I can kind of get away with it; instead of pouring paint on canvas, I’ll draw bile or vomit or piss. It’s like, ‘Fuck you but I’m obsessed with you.’” Schmidt has fans herself, which is lucky since, she says, “I probably would be pregnant in a trailer park right now if it weren’t for art—my work is completely for other people. I want kids in Kansas to be like, ‘Wow, that’s cool; I can do that!’” above: “weeping woman,” 2008. left: “super natural,” 2006.
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