shelflife by visitor

Walk into a gallery and it isn’t. It’s a floor in the hamperless bedroom of a parentless 15 year old fashion-addict with an anaphylactic aversion to hangers, drawers and the associated errata that exist only to contain and mask things intended to be seen.

I said addict. The pile reflects addiction. 15 feet long, 4 feet deep, 5 feet high–almost entirely composed of couture–balled-up, knotted, wrinkled and summited–Wallabee-shorn foot after Walabee-shorn foot.  Mark compiled the mound and invited available humans to engage it. The two things I liked best about Sizzler as a kid were all-you-can-eat popcorn shrimp and the dodecahydrant of soda that invited cup-upon-cup of concocting. An invitation to be photographed playing dress-up was adulthood’s Sizzler.

A few portraits of me made it into the book. Most are reflective of the hours spent spraying Sprite into Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper and grape Hi-C as a kid. Here’s a snap of the book and one of the mirrors of my anally-explosive childhood that Borthwick edited in.

It was a teepee teahouse. We were washing dishes in the shower of a gallery that had, just a tenant earlier, been the last gay-sex-friendly free-weight body-building gym in the not-yet gentrified meat-packing district. I wore a block-printed pink apron and fry-cook cum elf hat. Slippers–I was also styled in slippers. Maybe they weren’t so much slippers as they were oversized wool moccasins. It’s possible that they were even worn atop a pair of New Balances laced in a pair of hot pink fatlaces that I picked up in Milan. The details are as fuzzy as my prep-cook, dishwasher, waiter and documentarian job description. Anyone who attended could tell you that the only event I could possibly be describing was Susan Cianciolo’s amorphic and ever-mutable Run Restaurant.

Susan’s runway shows are rarely ever seen on anything resembling a runway. She’s always generated events just a unicorn-short of fantasy to showcase the ever-widening quiver of products she’s endlessly stitched, printed, bottled and stuffed. Run Restaurant epitomized her approach. The creative possibilities afforded by an ephemeral restaurant were ideal for showcasing clothes and a home line.

Jason Scandinaro, Susan, Mark Borthwick, Libby McInnis, Simone and Amadeo Pace and Stefano Giovannini were a few of the chefs whose grub was dished out in the gallery. I need to go thru some of the footage I recorded during that show. Mark, his kids and I made a little film–traveling around to produce, meat and fish markets to buy groceries and then filming the prep/cooking at his and Maria’s old new place on the west side as well as the ensuing cooking and eating over at Alleged. Below is the invite that Susan and Alleged sent out to announce the show. I still have one of Libby’s petit fours archived in the freezer.