Main Gallery


Randy Moore:
The Mile-High Club

In the show "The Mile-High Club," New York-based artist Randy Moore explores the world of Playboy magazine and the culture it has spawned: an All-American dream-space where men are men, women are bunnies, and fantasy is all.

Composed of over one hundred works on paper and one video, the show presents the well-known icons of Playboy's Swinger Style--the bunnies, the mansion, the black-and-white corporate logo--but in Moore's hands, they are stripped of their original glossy, air-brushed perfection. Instead, he reproduces them using pencil, ball point pen, sheets of white paper--materials that might be found stuffed in any schoolboy's backpack. The result is a kind of obsessive, almost spooky, portrait of desire and longing.

In the piece "Centerfolds of the Century: The Stuff that Dreams are Made of," Moore reproduces the 100 centerfolds that recently ran in Playboy's Millennium issue. Just as they were in the magazine, each woman in Moore's series of drawings is cataloged by name and ranked by number (according to what and who's criteria remains a mystery), with Marilyn Monroe holding pride of place at number one, Pamela Anderson Lee at number four, and the likes of Anna Nicole Smith, Betty Page and Jenny McCarthy following close behind. Further down are a host of others, long forgotten but still smiling. The result, both obsessive in its detail and eerie in its seemingly arbitrary classifications, brings to mind phylogenetic species charts found in natural history museums. In another piece, titled "Subscription, Female Version," Moore has reproduced, in oil on paper, the spines of a year's worth of Playboy magazines. Centered and isolated on a white sheet of paper, the images are surprisingly elegant yet at the same time, uncomfortably vulnerable. And in "Dissemination," the artist displays the results of a year-long performance where he masturbated to a different Playboy centerfold each month. In the resulting twelve drawings--each representing the playboy icon drawn with semen. He also paints (in oil) the spine of each months magazine, resulting in a large piece consisting of 24 drawings.

The opening reception is on Friday March 3rd, 8-11pm

 

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