WARNING- THIS POST FEATURES NUDITY!

23 year-old artist Ariel Brickman lives the kind of existence that out-of-towners describe with wide-eyed awe as a ‘New York lifestyle.’ Mainly this involves very large wigs, pasties, a lot of glitter, occasionally dressing in drag (and more frequently dressing with a bare midriff) and just downright fabulousness.

One person described Brickman to me as someone “with a very interesting train of thought,” which seems a very accurate statement, seeing as though there is evidence to back it. Her unique thought processes have led the Bushwick-based artist to create live installations featuring herself engaging with innovative concepts by way of colorful costumes and sets. Think a bath full of milk, or many tiny disco balls, and always boobs (a whole lot of ‘em).

Currently Brickman’s work is being shown at the Arch Collective Space in Bushwick, as part of the group show Second Taste. Curated by resident curator Eric Schmalenberger, formerly of Deitch Projects, the artists in the show also include  Bobby Dupree, Heather Garland, S.E. Nash, and Amanda O’Keefe. “This show was intended to shift the space’s lens to more sculptural, abstract work,” Brickman explains.

Tell me where you draw your inspiration from.
Mostly burlesque performance and drag queens. Male homosexuals have consistently over the ages appeared to possess the best grasp of certain aesthetic devices’ potential to accomplish acts of social resistance or cultural criticism within certain contexts, particularly in the manipulation of proportions according to rules of hyperbole. Related is burlesque performance, which possesses the same basic defining satirical mechanism as drag. So basically you can say that I see power in shiny things and good jokes.

Arch Collective’s first group show involved a now-infamous bathtub. Tell me about that.
This one is kind of interesting. My mother was visiting a month ago, on an idle, ordinary seeming Sunday, and my friend Eric called me. I met Eric in January of 2007, back when he was working at Deitch Projects on Grand St, and I was interning for the amazing burlesque performer and theater director Kate Valentine, who was directing a show for the also amazing burlesque performer Julie Atlas Muz. Eric and I had kept in touch over the years and had seen one another a few times now that I’d finally made it back to NYC last summer (July 2009). He told me that he had just been asked to curate gallery shows at a space four blocks on the street from the loft that I currently live at. Inside that space was a bathtub. At this point I said, “there’s a lot of things that you can put in that bathtub.” And he said, “actually, I was hoping to put YOU in that bathtub.”

And then I spent the next five days coming up with a concept and buying my first hot-fix gun (to accomplish proper swarovski pasties) and sure enough, the Friday after that phone call I was in the tub, made up as Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, wearing little more than glitter, soaking in cold milk and telling people that yes, my cookies were here for them to eat. This was born from the formula that I came up with to create “living signs” for, hopefully, each of the gallery shows at Arch. Basically, Eric tells me what the title and direction of the next show is, gives me about $200, and then I spend twice that and build a little one-person set as a reaction to the title and focus of the show. I also superimpose the show’s information (show title, artist’s names) as text onto that set, thereby accomplishing a kind of interactive, “indoor” window-display kind of thing. I also aim to act as a kind of gallery “docent”, who you can ask questions about the show, the artists in the show, particular pieces in the show, and what Arch Collective is and what they are all about. So I aim with each of these “installations” to encourage people to walk up and interact with the piece somehow, and also converse with me.

What do you like about living in NYC, and how does it influence your practice?
I like meeting so many people here that do so many interesting things. I also like being located no more than a half hour train ride from the fashion district at all times. When it comes to these last few pieces I’ve been doing, I’d say living in NYC has influenced my practice by inspiring me to create highly idealized, elaborate and supramundane domestic scenes that I get the pleasure of occupying for a few hours before having to face the grim reality that securing housing in NYC, which is at once stable and under circumstances that do not require a massive outlay of money each month, may not really exist.

What projects do you currently have in the works?
Finding another place to live. Also I hope to start doing some small pieces for an artist named Avi Adler. And of course, advertising Arch Collective as much as my tits and I can at the next opening there. I also hope to return to drawing and painting at some point as well.

Second Taste
Arch Collective NYC
18 Wyckoff Ave. Gar.
Brooklyn, NY, 11237




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