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PRESS RELEASE
Allison Edge, Maria Capolongo and Amy Piña
Opens: Friday, June 10, 7–9 p.m.
Location: 487 Driggs Ave, between N. 9 and N. 10
Dates: June 10–July 10, 2005
Gallery Hours: Thurs–Mon, 12–6pm
Contact: Don@JackthePelicanPresents.com, 646-644-6756
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Nude sex kittens and little white kittens with blue eyes share the stage in Amy Piña, Allison Edge and Maria Capolongo’s three-woman painting exhibition, “For Your Eyes Only.” The show’s title points to the 1981 James Bond classic, in evocation of the film’s pop-erotic allure. The artists, supervixens three, who met in 2000 as painting assistants in the studio of artist Jeff Koons, idenitfy with the Bond girls. Nevertheless, for them the title also means, “Eyes only. —Don’t touch, boys!” —the first rule of strippers and tease queens.
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Allison Edge
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Maria Capolongo
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Amy Piña
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Flavor one is the cute ‘n’ cuddly BEWs of Allison Edge—blue-eyed whites, that is—the paragon of perfection in cat breeding. A cat fanatic since birth, Edge finally got her perfect girl accessory kitten when she was eight, after years of pleading. As an adult, she transcends her embarrassment for this girlish fetish and paints with abandon—but softly—the calendar kitten photographs she hoarded as a child. “When they lose their cute,” she muses, “they are not loveable to everyone any more.”
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Maria Capolongo fetes the viewer with hilariously supersexed women, engaged in a bonanza of fetish fantasies. Jenna is a Little Bo Peep paean to the lustful lure of virginity. Amy features Amy Piña—the same—as a buxom blonde babe with ribbons in her hair roosting atop a shopping cart load of bananas. She holds one peeled in her hand. Danny, a former stripper and her best friend since high school, sprawls with abandon atop a helter skelter of “dirty” magazines. Capolongo props, stages and shoots the images from which she paints. For her, they are “hot,” but also (maybe) disturbing.
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Amy Piña stands in front of the mirror wearing only garters and other “trashy” lingerie to paint her nude self portraits. Her dignified and forthright poses, in which she shows herself exposing herself, recall John Singer Sargent’s scandalous Madame X and too Manet’s Olympia. Piña offers herself for delectation, but remains firmly in control of the situation with an almost stern intensity of mindful self-scrutiny.
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Three dimensions of female sexuality, strongly asserted, with only a modicum of ambivalence.
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