Photographer and performance artist Jaimie Warren is opening her new show, Somebody To Love, at Brooklyn’s American Medium, where it will run from August 9 to September 13.
Warren’s first solo exhibition with the gallery comes on the heels of a six-week residency at the Brooklyn space, culminating in a new photo, video, and performance piece created in collaboration with high school students Kim Corona, Genesis Monegro, Arti Tripathi, and Daria Mateescu—the fourth in a series of projects in which Warren has worked with unique communities in residencies to create new performance-based works.
The piece is an elaborate tribute to Freddy Mercury and the band Queen done as a recreation of the ‘Sts. Cosmas and Damian‘ (1370–75) by Matteo di Pacino, interspersing the painting’s original imagery with Warren’s characteristic blend of pop culture and art history. The installation and accompanying video present “a tableaux vivant come to life” where the original painting’s fictional documentation of a leg amputation is replaced with plastic, cardboard and papier-mâché depictions of B movie horror stars, contemporary pop celebrities, and “living piles of mush and eyeballs”, backed by a soundtrack of master opera singers paying tribute to Mercury, one of Warren’s biggest influences.
See the exhibition page for details. **
