The Art of Heartbreaker Hotel
Heartbreaker Hotel
Memories of misplaced lovers are like that of misplaced personal effects.
The things we lose between the sheets, behind the bed, under it, wedged against a dresser and a wall…
Broken Blue Valentines: the lot of them.
Behold as Madame reveals skeleton keys to rooms visited.
Peephole Exposures are Keyhole Vistas.
As is the airing out of dirty laundry, what the wrinkles in the sheets can say of all those who are...
Checking in and out, in and out, in and out, and in…
Can you hear the ghostly steps of forlorn lovers?
Who knows where all these broken hearts go, we’re left to wonder…
“Madame no. 1” (Not for Sale)
Artists’ Statement:
The art pieces included in Heartbreaker Hotel are the combined efforts of Rai Fordyce and Helen Grant.
Grant brought a variety of skills and experience with cyanotype to the project. Fordyce brought years of collected burlesque ephemera, some vintage and some much newer pieces, to function as elements that hint at a salacious scene.
Fordyce also wanted to channel the vintage era of 1940’s Keyhole Pinups like those seen from artists such as Gil Elvgren and Peter Driben. If you Google image search “Keyhole Pinup Magazines,” you’ll find these peep-themed, pinup images once graced the covers of old magazines like, “Whisper.”
Image via Google Search
Grant, remembering the last gift of a long-dead master, wanted to channel some of Duchamp’s “Étant donnés (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas).”
Image via Google Search
The work as described via Wikipedia: “...is a tableau, visible only through a pair of peepholes (one for each eye) in a wooden door, of a nude woman lying on her back with her face hidden, legs spread, holding a gas lamp in the air in one hand against a landscape backdrop...It is composed of an old wooden door, nails, bricks, brass, aluminium sheet, steel binder clips, velvet, leaves, twigs, a female form made of parchment, hair, glass, plastic clothespins, oil paint, linoleum, an assortment of lights, a landscape composed of hand-painted and photographed elements and an electric motor housed in a cookie tin which rotates a perforated disc.”
In researching this art work, Grant also discovered a serendipitous connection to a strip tease action inspired by the same work:
”And there is a film by a contemporary female artist, Hannah Wilke (1940-93), who went to art school in Philadelphia, saw “Étant Donnés ” soon after its installation and remembered finding it “repulsive.” She later did a performance about it in which she assumed the place of the prone figure. And in a 1976 film made in the museum’s Duchamp gallery, she engaged with “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,” his other grand erotic masterwork.
Dressed in a high-fashion white tailored suit and fedora, she does a slow striptease in front of the piece, or rather behind it, as the camera shoots her performance through the glass and through Duchamp’s painted phallic and vaginal forms frozen in unconsummated union.
Wilke, who was a great beauty, preens, shifts, undoes a button, tips her hat, shifts, stares, slowly pulls at a zipper. The Bride and the Bachelors can never complete their erotic task, but she can. In her performance she was the cool but active counterpart to the woman in “Étant Donnés,” just as exposed but in control of the exposure.
Duchamp, the transcendent pornographer, would have understood all these contradictions. I suspect he saw himself both as the distanced creator of his final work and as the passively light-bearing figure lying within it. And surely he would have agreed with Wilke’s tough-love words: “To honor Duchamp is to oppose him.” Because he opposed himself or the mythical self he invented by slaving away at material forms of art that he had declared beneath contempt. His dispassionate passion is what continues to make him magnetic. Tough self-love, perverse and seductive, is what “Étant Donnés” is about.” - via New York Times, “Landscape Eros: Through the Peephole”
Their inspirations and improvisational ideas were combined much like found objects placed together in complimentary scenes. A bottle of booze here, a sex toy there, a perfume bottle nestled near a lacy bra, a pair of garters left to dangle, a rosary suspended in mid-air, flowers pressed, the mask akimbo, a shoe forgotten, lipstick strewn, a whip coiled - each item arranged inside these keyhole images seeks to tell a story, whether in connection to other objects or all on its own. The blue-hue of the cyanotype lends itself well to the idea of Blue Valentines. The cyanotype fluid, at Fordyce’s suggestion, had been painted into the shape of a keyhole, which led Grant to start calling them “keyhole vistas.”
The pair of artists decided the unfinished, raw edge of the fabric should remain as it hangs, a representation of the sordid, hasty tryst between people too messy to hem their fraying edges. The wrinkles in the cloth serve to remind us of the activities that meet at the intersections of space and time. The characters that inhabit the Heartbreaker Hotel are rushed. They have their vices to attend. After all, someone else will just clean it up for them. The images are hung using clothes pins and laundry cord to further suggest a sense of having one’s nightly activities brought to light, in essence: exposed.
Artist Bios:
Rai Fordyce has been practicing burlesque for the past seven years in the greater OKC metro area. She is a textile artist, event coordinator, and producer.
Helen Grant is a regular Resonator coordinator, artist, photographer, and writer. She co-produces Red Light Specials.
Heartbreaker Hotel’s art can be viewed by appointment or during Resonator events held between 2/29 and 3/4.
A piece will be on display for the June 12th, 2nd Friday Norman Art Walk.
Some prints still available for sale.
Please use the contact form to inquire about:
The post-show, pricing,
Shipping options outside of the downtown Norman area,
OR curbside pick-up at Resonator Institute, 325 E. Main St., Norman, OK.
“The Charmer” (sold)
“Mary Jane”
“La Domme Madame” (sold)
“The Vigilante” (sold)
“The Starlet”
“The Bridesmaid” (sold)
“The Perfumer”
“The Virgin” (sold)
“Girl Ganger”
“The Performer” (sold)
“The Cougar”