Flex Yr Nuts/ Judith Supine's "Dirt Mansion"

Chances are if you've walked the streets of New York over the past year you've witnessed Judith Supine's out-of-skull creations first hand: A figure, 50' in scale, clinging to the Manhattan Bridge, in all its oft-neon glory; another, rounded and menacing bobbing along the East River on an inner-tube, grinning as on-lookers stop to point and gawk; and their peers--a veritable army of colorfully contorted caricatures staring down passers-by through a thin layer of wheat paste. The renowned street artist's  growing catalogue of mangled collage-based beings, and his reputation for doing some seriously balls-all-the-way-out-the-fly-of-your-jeans guerilla installations (Supine tossed a piece up on the window of the U.S. army recruitment office in Time Square!) have unsurprisingly provoked a ton of buzz for his first NYC solo exhibition. 

In early April, at the opening of "Dirt Mansion," English Kills Gallery in Bushwick was transformed into a funhouse, where Supine's quintessential large-scale creations wound attendees through a small UV soaked maze. Like other street artists, Banksy and Faile, Supine chose to open his one-man show at a small warehouse, as opposed to a well-established gallery. This gave him the ability to utilize every inch of space. The black-light brought his flourescent giants to life, as they glared down on the crowd from every angle. A huge set of neon hands at the back of the space held a pair of scissors and snipped away at its own digits, which was demonstrative of Supine's own unique style. He puts his own twist on the age old art of d.i.y. cut and paste collage work (in the vein of punk rock flyer art). he pulls his material from the bowels of city dumpsters--tossed out magazines and newspapers, which he arranges to his liking, enlarges via a photocopier, paints, and then what pastes to his chosen canvas.

For the show, he also built a series of warped miniature-scale haunted houses (dirt mansions, I suppose). Tiny windows on the houses served as peep-holes into nightmarish dioramas--scenes that featured fat cats and their pearl-studded trophy wives enjoying an after diner cocktail alongside grim-faced soldiers sporting head-wounds. His rearrangement of texts has an eerie satirical quality. Supine pokes at the doughy physique of contemporary American culture, and a generations complete disaffection to real suffering that exists outside of the general poor sap's concept of a bad day (The train took forever this morning, and so-and-so got eliminated from American idol!). Supine's "Dirt Mansion," which is a perfect transition from the artist's usual arena of the streets to a gallery show, will echo in the heads of its viewers, a few choice words from E.E. Cummings, who he quotes by saying, "there is some shit I will not eat."