Draw and destroy
Issue #36
L.A. artist Jesse Spears isn’t afraid to create chaos in her work
By Valerie Palmer
Published: June 1st, 2008 | 3:44pm
Somehow Jesse Spears makes decapitation cute. Brightly colored heads with wavy green hair or a mop of purple underneath a baseball hat float across her paintings with round drops of blood falling neatly from their necks. There’s also plenty of vomiting and disembodied hands. Even the cars sustain injuries in Spears’ artwork; boxy vintage models gush jagged, red blood — a recurring motif she refers to as carnage.
Growing up in the Los Angeles area, Spears was the misfit who couldn’t wait to graduate, but as is often the case, the underdogs in high school triumph in the real world. “I kind of feel like it’s the nerds that run the world,” Spears says. “They’re the ones who aren’t afraid to do things. They’ve got that drive. They’re used to being made fun of, so they don’t care what other people think.” This attitude has served her well in the years since she dropped out of Cal Arts, lived in Hawaii for a spell, and then returned to L.A. to attend the “school of life.”
In the last year, Spears’ art has caught the attention of some key people like T-shirt guru Mitra Khayyam of Blood is the New Black and Aaron Rose of Beautiful Losers fame, who recruited her for L.A.’s first annual Swerve Festival, a weekend music, film, and art extravaganza. She talks excitedly about her early influences — a scene of California artists that includes the late painter-muralist Margaret Kilgallen and her husband, graffiti artist Barry McGee. She gets a look of disbelief on her face when she mentions that she works with some of these artists. “And now Aaron Rose is hiring me, and it’s all coming totally full circle,” she says.
Spears is a regular at L.A.’s underground music mecca The Smell, where her colorful murals of singing birds and mortally wounded humans adorn the walls. Not bad for a 23-year-old art-school dropout.
But the brightly colored, cartoonish violence in her paintings of severed heads and handless dudes is just the beginning really. “Now I’m in performance mode, where I just want to smash stuff,” Spears says. With one project involving guns and liquor bottles filled with paint already under her belt, she’s got her sights set on the next one, which will involve high fashion and heavy construction.
When the topic of women’s fashion magazines comes up, tensions rise. “You know when you look in magazines and the models are wearing all these clothes? I don’t know what you’re supposed to do in those clothes. You can’t do anything in those clothes, so I don’t wear them,” she says, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt herself. This exasperation spawned a performance and video project that will involve Spears wearing fake nails, high heels, plenty of jewelry, a very narrow pencil skirt, and, all the while, holding a giant purse as she constructs a brick wall. “I’m going to mix the cement and make a wall and then line bottles of paint on it and then shoot them and just destroy the whole thing,” she says.
When asked about the violence in her work, Spears shrugs and offers thoughtful answers but is unsure herself what it all means. On one hand, any young person who’s not angry in today’s world should be checked for a pulse, but on the other hand, it’s usually the boys who tackle this kind of stuff — the guns, the smashing, the decapitation. Spears says it’s something she needs to purge, and the severed body parts and the bleeding cars are part of a larger effort to understand violence and destruction better. “I feel like destruction is such a huge part of growth,” she says. “Like with nature or anything. Things can’t grow unless other things get destroyed or fall apart.”
So as growth and destruction walk hand in hand through life, Spears destroys the stereotypes we hold near and dear, leaving a trail of broken glass and colorful severed heads in her wake. “It’s just a little reminder that we could instantly become carnage,” she says. “We’re so delicate that it just blows my mind.”
Check out Jesse Spears’ blog at carnageknockout.blogspot.com.
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