Helper, Brooklyn, NY
Karl-Craft is not shy to celebrate the genetic origins of character. Not only does Michael Stickrod share the name Karl with his father Richard and son Oskar but also the art of Karl-Craft. helper invites you to experience these individual expressions of distinct genetic origin.
Text by Stanley Wrzyszczynski for the Karl-Craft exhibition announcement.
Cyanotype on canvas, 8 × 6 ft.
Made with sixteen of the artist’s mother’s wigs from her go-go years and roadside-attraction ephemera preserved from family vacations during the 1980s. Exposed in sunlight on the roof of Cooper Union’s Foundation Building, New York.
Head Crest (Blue-Wigs) was made by arranging sixteen wigs belonging to Stickrod’s mother (from her go-go years) together with printed ephemera collected from roadside attractions visited during family vacations in the 1980s. The objects were exposed in sunlight on the roof of Cooper Union’s Foundation Building, producing an eight-by-six-foot cyanotype: a family archive rendered as silhouettes, halos, and interruptions in blue.
The rooftop carries another, largely unrealized history. Peter Cooper originally imagined it as a democratic garden above the city – a place where working people and students could gather, walk, take refreshments, listen to music, and look out across Manhattan. Although the garden was never completed, its promise of open air and shared civic space remained attached to the building.
Made within that unfulfilled social space, Head Crest (Blue-Wigs) brings private memory into contact with a larger public dream. The wigs retain traces of performance, femininity, and self-invention, while the vacation fragments preserve the manufactured wonder of American roadside tourism. Sunlight fixes them together as a temporary congregation: part portrait, part map, and part afterimage.
