Nose Job (group show) at Eric Firestone Gallery NY

Eric Firestone is pleased to announce a summer group show, Nose Job, curated by Carlo McCormick, opening July 15 - August 21 in East Hampton, NY. With a sly wink to Warhol's iconic early Sixties image "Before and After" in which he appropriated and altered a plastic surgery ad for a nose job to comment on our culture's ideals of beauty, Nose Job is in fact a tribute to the old vernacular folk art form of nose art dating from both World Wars in which soldiers painted images and slogans on the noses of military aircraft.


Firestone and McCormick began the project by scouring the 'bone yards" of the Arizona desert where old disused airplanes of America's air force go to die. They collected a wide range of nose cones of various shapes and sizes. The pair invited an array of contemporary artists to transform these curious relics into art objects. What started as a whim found deep resonance in the creative community as many artists have their own associations and inspirations from the legacy of nose art. Participating artists include Aiko, Dan Colen, Peter Dayton, Viejas Del Mercado, Jane Dickson, Shepard Fairey, Futura, How & Nosm, Juan James, Ryan McGinness, Tara McPherson, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Lee Quinones, Carlos (MARE 139) Rodriguez, Retna, Saner, Kenny Scharf, Shelter Serra, Swoon, JJ Veronis and Aaron Young.


Nose Job is a subversive update of art's role in the collective imagination of the dream of flying in an era of increasing discomfort, delays and dread. The show is simultaneously an act of aesthetic recycling, a reinterpretation of a self-taught visionary art form that both borrowed from and contributed to the course of American popular culture (with images that ran the gamut from pin-up girls and tattoo designs to comic and cartoon figures), and a present day invocation of humanity's timeless fascination with flight. Call it a case of post-modern jetlag, but it is a short trip from the prescient drawings of an airborne man by Leonardo da Vinci or Alexander Calder's painted airplanes for Braniff Airlines, which, like the magic of travel today can also transport us to someplace utterly unfamiliar.


Eric Firestone Gallery is located at 4 Newtown Lane in East Hampton, NY. The gallery is open from 10am-6pm Sunday-Thursday; 10am-8pm Friday and Saturday.