Time Stereo presents "Devil’s Devil’s Nite" / The Lab Gallery at the Roger Smith Hotel, NYC
Trong G. Nguyen
In the 80s, Detroit was notorious for its "celebrations" on Devil’s Night, the evening before Halloween. What traditionally started out as adolescent mischief like playing "ding-dong-ditch" and soaping windows turned into an annual phenomenon of ritualistic arson where at its high point in 1984, 800 fires set the city violently ablaze. In an effort to subdue the crime rate on Devil’s Night, law enforcement subsequently established curfews that are still maintained to this day.
Over the last several years, the Michigan art and music collective Time Stereo has directed our attention to the little-known fact that the evening before Devil’s Night is actually the "Devil’s Devil’s Nite." To celebrate this holiday in New York City fashion, Time Stereo brings an ill tale of gory, oddball and politically acorrect work to the Lab Gallery at the Roger Smith Hotel for a good time not seen since The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Herman Nitsch.
In their hometown of Detroit, the collective has traditionally concocted other performance-based, audience-interactive installations like Noise Camp and the Haunted Tube, the latter a homemade cylindrical maze of terror incorporating art and experimental noise music. In what will culminate with a harsh sonic performance by Princess Dragon Mom and a promising, destructive cameo by the enigmatic Devil’s Robot on October 29th, "Devil’s Devil’s Nite" goes all out with stuffed blood sculptures, howling pumpkins and paintings of werewolves, decapitation, UFO’s and broken robots splayed into swastikas.
Started ten years ago by Davin Brainard and Warn Defever, Time Stereo has produced bands from Ida to Godzuki and Mike Kelley’s Destroy All Monsters, to noise groups like Brainard’s PDM and Defever’s 4AD mainstay His Name Is Alive. The two have always been open to collaborations with all variants of artists and musicians, often creating happenings that combine the dynamic Detroit music scene with seriously unpretentious, whimsical art-making which injects infectious fun back into the global art academy.
For the Lab exhibit, Brainard and Defever brought with them the extended Time Stereo family, including Sarah Lapinski (Girlee Detroit), Jamie Easter (The Piranhas), Hitoko Sakai (MSBR and NIKO), Ronald Cornelissen, Dion Fischer (Godzuki), and MOG.
The street-level midtown space is currently filled with campy, horror-inspired works such as Dion Fischer’s cool graffiti goth paintings, depicting dark-wave imagery like Vincent Price shadowed by a bat, and a bright red blood puddle literally bleeding out of its wooden frame. Historically, the group has shown a penchant for creating sound and music-channeling devices out of usually non-aural objects such as acorns, logs and watermelons. For the Halloween edition, Warn Defever and Hitoko Sakai have engineered some state-of-the-art Electric Pumpkins, readymade and amp-ready. These may not give i-Pods a run for the money any time soon, but they sure look like fun. MOG, Jamie Easter and Rotterdam-based Ronald Cornelissen contribute Williamsburg-inspired, chaos-induced drawings about colorful robo-sex, dark tomb-travelers and more robo-sex. Sarah Lapinski’s dismembered stuffed arm with protruding humerus, all made of bunting and felt, is a ghastly creation that should not supplant the equally huggable teddy bear. Adding to the playful atmosphere, she also suspends from the ceiling adorably vampiric, fanged "Wedgies"–stuffed whale-like creatures–as well as large plump red felt blood droplets and black leather oil drips, perhaps an embedded socio-political comment on "blood money?" Davin Brainard fills out the rest of the space with a number of small paintings narrating the myth of the Devil’s Robot, a menacing, horned being with grappling claws and tubular metallic arms. A small, primitive wooden sculpture of the diabolical robot surrounded by jagged flames adorns the gallery’s window casing.
Time Stereo’s slogan, "Your Tapes!", exemplified their original intention of making music cassettes available to everyone. The times have changed, but with the Devil’s Devil’s Nite, Brainard, Defever, and friends show that the good-hearted fun remains the same.
