Currently on view:
Aaron Cobbett, Through

with Shawn Peterson in the project room.

February 27th - April 5th, 2003.

Debs & Co is pleased to present Through, an exhibition of new photographs and a video by Aaron Cobbett. The exhibition will be Cobbett's third solo show with the gallery.

In this new series of portraits, the photographer has restricted his usually flamboyant color palette, using reduced blacks, whites and reds in a stark exploration of glamour and violence. Model-victims pose as dead or returned from the grave. White-painted haints seduce earthly disco boys. The portraits embody a cheery sort of goth, however: the blood is quite fake and the vamping is filmic. The stiletto-heeled ghost woman and the scantily clad go-go boy with the noose around his neck may be winking at the camera. Still, there is a dark heart to the show. In this contest between high art horror show and heavy metal video, Cobbett makes explicit his sexy macabre dreamworld.

Cobbett's video The Real Thing is projected in the back room of the gallery, providing a disco thump to the show. The four-and-a-half minute video features a red-painted woman with a mane of white hair lipsynching to the 1978 D.C. LaRue hit "Do You Want the Real Thing?" Behind her, disco balls spin and boys in cocoons unravel into nudity. The sexually charged iconography is a disturbing mix of Sylvester and Mariko Mori.

Cobbett is renowned for his highly stylized, extravagant portraits of go-go boys, celebrities, drag queens and New York personalities for magazines like Interview, Vanity Fair, Vogue, TETU, Glamour, Index, Honcho, and more. He lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from New York University in 1993. His work has been exhibited at commercial and non-profit galleries in Boston, Belgium, and Germany. A monograph of his work, SuperEros, is published by Bruno Gmünder Verlag.


In the project room: SHAWN PETERSON

Following the traditions of Victorian funerary culture, funhouse psychology, and freakshow ritual, Shawn Peterson presents an installation of highly crafted and sublimely un-schooled drawing, painting and sculpture. Peterson's tramp-art ý-go-go calligraphed memento mori feature legends crying "loving you, losing you," "never can say goodbye," and "don't leave me this way," set amid a sampler from the artist's Brooklyn parlor. Super creepy and funny as hell, Peterson's work is an idiosyncratic riff on Americana and death.