Niagra

This piece is currently hanging in Gallery 402. It is titled "Opium House" by Niagra.
Niagra materialized on the scene in the late 70's as front person for the noise band DESTROY ALL
MONSTERS. Fellow band mates read like a who's who, including Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw (big time artists), Ron Asheton (Iggy and the Stooges guitarist), Mike Davis (MC5 bass player). Niagara took Destroy all Monsters from noise to punk in the 80's. Aside from singing and self-destructive stage habits, Niagara designed the band's posters, singles and album art.

Her early cover art, done in pen & ink and gouache, appear to be self portraits. Her fierce female depictions of femme fatales plumb the depths of trash culture. "It's the men who cry in my paintings," Niagara muses. She later showed "Warholistic" use of colour on her large canvases and actually met Andy Warhol in the late 70's. Colonel Galaxy, Niagara's promoter/body guard comments, "Niagara paints off register to make it look like a bad silk screen but she does it with such precision, people still think they're done by machine. Warhol would love it."

Niagara’s lethal beauties, accessorized with guns and switchblades, make no apologies and leave no survivors. She amplifies her subjects with bitingly humorous captions like: I Lied, Over Your Dead Body, Geisha This and Here’s For Your Bad Manners. “I paint real strong women; a Niagara girls [is] revengeful, but she gets her own way,” the artist explains and adds matter-of-factly, “There’s a lot of crime in my paintings.” Criminal violence is emblematic of the artist’s Detroit home, but her voluptuous felons may jolt Washingtonian sensibilities. Even so, viewers are bound to find her glamorous she-clones more charming and less abrasive than their maladjusted pulp-film cohorts and Niagara thwarts the possibility of her malevolent heroines eliding with the objective world by emphasizing their pictorial status. Exploiting the flatness of her media, she abstracts textures and compresses figures and backgrounds into precisely cropped frames, constructing a format which gives the unmistakable impression that the Niagara Woman and her occasional antagonists are the only personae that could possibly inhabit their borders.

Niagara’s painting and graphic techniques are as strong and appealing as the characters to which they give being. With fluid lines and gracefully contoured areas of bold color she composes tightly-constructed and harmoniously balanced designs. Her crisp, fresh and immediate pictures demonstrate her aesthetic philosophy: “I don’t care about making art that only talks to other artists.” Her artistic career began in the 1970s when she studied painting at the University of Michigan. Soon thereafter she invented her signature “Niagara Woman.”

Whereas her pictorial style and subjects are indebted in part to the pop masters Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Niagara ascribes her most powerful influences to the Pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau artists Alfons Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley. Her linear technique and application of oriental graphic designs reveal the aesthetic impact of her nineteenth-century predecessors. On her fascination with their predilection for morbid eroticism, she comments “I like all that dark stuff.”