Irena Jurek: Teddies, Trench Coats & Tiaras
Irena Jurek, California Dreamin’, 2015, colored pencil, ink, glitter, and acrylic on paper, 10×14, image courtesy of Romeo
Irena Jurek’s genre can probably be best articulated by a late night cruiser of self-published erotica on Amazon. The words in the search bar might read something like this: “anthropomorphized kitties and piglets” or “big salivating wolves.” It’s hard to know whose fantasy is being written – the artist’s, the viewer’s, or an imagined one based on a shared culture of stale Puritanism. The kind in which married men late-night sext with strangers who swear that they’re half-giraffe/half-woman, but in reality they’re actually aliens who really just need a few bucks to buy a bus ticket back to their (better) planets.
Irena Jurek, Cottage Party, 2016, colored pencil, pencil, watercolor, glitter, 12×16, image courtesy of Romeo
Shockingly, this ravenous exhibition provides a relatively tame sampling of Jurek’s work. When it comes to taste and aesthetic judgment, Jurek is a wild child who was raised by naughty monkeys. She once mentioned that she kept a tally in grad school of what everybody said not to do, and then proceeded to do every one of those things. Her inter-world slippages are so slippery that it’s hard to find one’s footing. One man’s mental trash is Jurek’s treasure, and she will painstakingly collage and illustrate that trash until the work has blown past camp and straight into the ocean, where it bumps into a merman whose fin swims at attention.
Irena Jurek, Neptune’s Net, 2016, acrylic, watercolor, ink, colored pencil, glitter on paper, 18×24, image courtesy of Romeo
Jurek’s characters know what they want. Even her silliest ingénues have wittingly cast themselves as innocent ‘oops!’ girls, purposefully playing coy within their fantasies of misdirected mating. I’m pretty sure Jurek’s carnal canines and feral frogs would happily accept highly-paid public humiliation video jobs, laughing all the way to the bank. This show packs a smack-load of tacky and treif, which is my cup of tea on a hot summer day. Because deep down who wants to be a good girl anyway? Bring a handheld fan to this show ‘cause it’s STEAMY! And messed up.
Teddies, Trench Coats & Tiaras
can be viewed through August 19 at
Romeo
90 Ludlow Street, New York, NY 10002
Romeo
Jordan Rathus is a video and performance artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her BFA in Film and Television Production from New York University in 2005 and her MFA in Visual Arts: New Genres from Columbia University in 2012. Her work recontextualizes storytelling formats such as narrative film and reality television to humorously and critically examine our collective contributions to pop culture. Rathus teaches in the media department at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.
Featured Image:
Irena Jurek
Text Me
2016
acrylic, pencil, ink, and mixed media
16×20
image courtesy of Romeo