Name:
reggie
Profile:
Raised in Berlin, Sao Paulo and NYC I now live in Los Angeles. I'm a rocker mom, wife, art collector, culture vulture and founder of this digital enterprise. I take pictures for a living.
www.reggieworld.com
Kembra Pfahler and the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black
Not so horrifying in person.
The amazingly talented Kembra Pfahler is gorgeous sans her costumes. With a long art and performance career that has spanned 18 years. Ms. Pfahler has cracked eggs on her crotch in concert (see video below), sewn up her vagina to make a statement about gender, and been an artist and downtown fixture on the scene for almost two decades. I was lucky enough to photograph her band for Details years ago and have been a huge fan ever since. Kembra's new album, Actresstocracy is out this fall. Kembra performed at ART BASEL Miami last year and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. I'm so excited that she is getting the recognition she deserves. An incredible artist and performer.
Image above from Kembra's album cover. The songs on the first album are hard rockin with driving quitars set to hilarious lyrics. Honky Tonk Biscuit Queen and Born to Bake are funny as shit.
Here is a bio from the Whitney biennial. Image a still from her performance "Actresstocracy" on Independent Film Channel. (VFAIR)
Kembra Pfahler is the woman behind The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, a theatrical rock group that links a hideous monster aesthetic to a dark, hysterical feminine archetype. Named in honor of cult horror film heroine Karen Black, Pfahler's band performs heavy-bottomed punk-metal songs amid elaborate hand-constructed sets where she engages an animalistic, fetishistic practice of acting out transgressive physical feats. Pfahler's stage persona has been described as a dominant "lady devil" who relishes destroying notions of female beauty rooted in purity and innocence. Wearing a teased black bouffant wig with blacked-out teeth, black stiletto boots, and black underwear, her nude body painted blue, pink, or yellow, Pfahler heads a team of ladies appointed in similar campy glamour while male band members including her ex-husband, Samoa, maintain masculine rockabilly stylings. Pfahler and Samoa formed The Voluptuous Horror in 1990 after ten years of making Super 8 horror films and visual and performance art that they felt would benefit from a musical soundtrack, looking to Viennese Actionists Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler as original influences. Rebelling against a degraded, polluted world, Pfahler developed an "anti-naturalism" platform on which to promote VHOKB reflecting their desire to reveal the attraction of repulsion.
The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black fashion their props and sets from low-tech, readily accessible materials under the rubric of Pfahler's theory of Availablism, creating structural items and costumes such as ladybug and flower head uniforms as visual accompaniments to their songs. For Chopsley (1996), an oversize animal trap controlled by a female band member snaps open and shut on Pfahler as she sings about a "rabid bikini model." In a 2006 performance at New York's Deitch Projects, The Sound of Magic, band members danced with Mylar-covered boards shaped like giant razor blades and shark heads before a backdrop of starkly striped paintings. Members Pfahler, Samoa, Adam Cardone, Magal, Adam Pfahler, Dave Weston, and Karen Black Girls Bijoux Altamirano, Alice Moy, Anne Hanavan, Jackie Rivera, Laure Leber, and Armen Ra writhe and jump throughout these ritualized ceremonies-cum-rock shows.
Recently Pfahler has directed her interests in bodily transformation to curatorial practice. In Womanizer (2007), also at Deitch Projects, she co-curated a show that demonstrated an "evolution beyond gender" by showing works by women seeking to explode the dualism inherent to male/female opposition. Pfahler exhibited a suite of photographs in which, dressed only in thigh-high lace-up boots and blue body paint, she mimes fornicating with a skeleton symbolizing her recently deceased boyfriend. Conflating horror, death, and female sexuality, Pfahler and VHOKB tantalize the viewer by exemplifying an abhorrent sublime, terrible as it is irresistible. TRINIE DALTON
The amazingly talented Kembra Pfahler is gorgeous sans her costumes. With a long art and performance career that has spanned 18 years. Ms. Pfahler has cracked eggs on her crotch in concert (see video below), sewn up her vagina to make a statement about gender, and been an artist and downtown fixture on the scene for almost two decades. I was lucky enough to photograph her band for Details years ago and have been a huge fan ever since. Kembra's new album, Actresstocracy is out this fall. Kembra performed at ART BASEL Miami last year and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. I'm so excited that she is getting the recognition she deserves. An incredible artist and performer.
Image above from Kembra's album cover. The songs on the first album are hard rockin with driving quitars set to hilarious lyrics. Honky Tonk Biscuit Queen and Born to Bake are funny as shit.
Here is a bio from the Whitney biennial. Image a still from her performance "Actresstocracy" on Independent Film Channel. (VFAIR)
Kembra Pfahler is the woman behind The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, a theatrical rock group that links a hideous monster aesthetic to a dark, hysterical feminine archetype. Named in honor of cult horror film heroine Karen Black, Pfahler's band performs heavy-bottomed punk-metal songs amid elaborate hand-constructed sets where she engages an animalistic, fetishistic practice of acting out transgressive physical feats. Pfahler's stage persona has been described as a dominant "lady devil" who relishes destroying notions of female beauty rooted in purity and innocence. Wearing a teased black bouffant wig with blacked-out teeth, black stiletto boots, and black underwear, her nude body painted blue, pink, or yellow, Pfahler heads a team of ladies appointed in similar campy glamour while male band members including her ex-husband, Samoa, maintain masculine rockabilly stylings. Pfahler and Samoa formed The Voluptuous Horror in 1990 after ten years of making Super 8 horror films and visual and performance art that they felt would benefit from a musical soundtrack, looking to Viennese Actionists Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler as original influences. Rebelling against a degraded, polluted world, Pfahler developed an "anti-naturalism" platform on which to promote VHOKB reflecting their desire to reveal the attraction of repulsion.
The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black fashion their props and sets from low-tech, readily accessible materials under the rubric of Pfahler's theory of Availablism, creating structural items and costumes such as ladybug and flower head uniforms as visual accompaniments to their songs. For Chopsley (1996), an oversize animal trap controlled by a female band member snaps open and shut on Pfahler as she sings about a "rabid bikini model." In a 2006 performance at New York's Deitch Projects, The Sound of Magic, band members danced with Mylar-covered boards shaped like giant razor blades and shark heads before a backdrop of starkly striped paintings. Members Pfahler, Samoa, Adam Cardone, Magal, Adam Pfahler, Dave Weston, and Karen Black Girls Bijoux Altamirano, Alice Moy, Anne Hanavan, Jackie Rivera, Laure Leber, and Armen Ra writhe and jump throughout these ritualized ceremonies-cum-rock shows.
Recently Pfahler has directed her interests in bodily transformation to curatorial practice. In Womanizer (2007), also at Deitch Projects, she co-curated a show that demonstrated an "evolution beyond gender" by showing works by women seeking to explode the dualism inherent to male/female opposition. Pfahler exhibited a suite of photographs in which, dressed only in thigh-high lace-up boots and blue body paint, she mimes fornicating with a skeleton symbolizing her recently deceased boyfriend. Conflating horror, death, and female sexuality, Pfahler and VHOKB tantalize the viewer by exemplifying an abhorrent sublime, terrible as it is irresistible. TRINIE DALTON
Categories:
Subscribe to this blog's feed
Email reggie
Leave a comment