Self Love, 2007, pencil, color pencil, acrylic on paper, 12.5" x 8.5"

	WHAT BLEEDS FOR SEVEN DAYS & DOESN'T DIE? by Kathy Grayson "Imagination decomposes all creation, and with the raw materials accumulated and disposed in accordance with rules whose origins one cannot find save in the furthest depths of the soul, it creates a new world" - Baudelaire, "The Salon of 1859" in Art in Paris 1845-1862 I met Aurel shortly after she moved to New York City in 2005 when she walked up to me at a bar and said, "You hate me, don't you?" I might have at the time: I think she was having a fake affair with one of my roommates and flirting with his girlfriend and just in general causing upheaval in my peer group. But I didn't immediately place who this skinny blonde with the big glasses was and was mostly just taken aback that anyone, if anticipating displeasure, would so eagerly court it. Aurel might want all of us to hate her a little bit. She makes parent-pleasingly virtuoso drawings of parent-hating, parent scandalizing content, the sort of FUCK YOU / I LOVE YOU that is a driving theme in her artworks. She used to have a high school art teacher with one glass eye who loved everything she did, which drove her crazy. She would try her hardest each day to make something he found offensive, but nothing worked. She won the "Artistic Excellence Award" three years in a row. Her not just big city living but big city wallowing might be a rebellious reaction to her rural upbringing. She grew up in Kamloops, British Columbia with little or no discipline at all; in her own words "somewhere between hippy idealism and redneck reality." She had parents who built their own house, grew their own food and drank from a creek in the back yard. They had chickens, pigs, cows, and innumerable dogs and cats running around. Her father drove a pickup truck and dirt biked around the forest listening to classic rock, drinking beer and shooting animals. Not necessarily a reliable witness, given her aforementioned urges to shock and appall, young Aurel was a "teenage slut in gold hoop earrings and leopard hot pants blacking out at bonfire parties in the woods." She drew satanic drawings and spray painted highway overpasses; people would cross out her work, writing SLUT across it. She dropped out of high school for a year, hitchhiked to bars to steal drinks, and slept with everyone she could. They drove her out of town like a witch. Her drawing style evolved maybe in a recalcitrant reaction to the art scene in Vancouver, where Aurel resided after high school teaching herself art history and philosophy. Instead of making status-quo comic style doodles in worn-out sketchbooks, she made technical hyperrealist drawings on huge archival paper. Her work caught the eye of fellow Vancouver outsider Tim Barber (now a major photography curator and maker in New York City) and he encouraged her to do her own thing. Artist Steven Shearer taught her that being technically brilliant wasn't necessarily lame; that you can be a punk with a precise pencil just as much as with a sloppy brush or with a camera and a penis. Life in Vancouver was charmed and perfect, so she "needed to make life more difficult," in a typical Aurel move of courting disaster. Throwing herself headlong into the nastiest neighborhood of the toughest city around, Aurel finally found her element in New York City's Chinatown. Every day she experiences some heartbreaking horribleness, finding some fetid fish guts on the street, scoring or getting scammed. Her loves: "sweaty smoky sleazy scenes, rats, rumors, cute drug dealers, eel tanks, no morals, no rules, no problem." With exquisitely rendered colored pencil and graphite, and often a few body fluids too, Aurel today makes terrifying Arcimboldo babes and haunting party monster ghouls out of this muck, the punkest New York City junk around. As avidly as an Audubon chased a chickadee, Aurel scavenges street shit and squirrels it home to her studio to draw. Penis pumps, dead sparrows, hairy band-aids, dirty panties, puke and pornos have all turned up on her camera or in her studio collection. But despite the precision with which they are drawn, her artworks are never too tidy. Instead they feel like they are made on a four-day speed-fuelled sweaty hangover spree of self-destruction, not in the sense that they are hurried but more that her decisions seem to be made with the sort of "fuck it" confidence that comes from a woman on the brink with nothing to lose. Her early work varies the most, as she tests her technique on text, zombies, peacocks and more, almost as though her light and dark sides were battling for her attention. Supernatural greeted me when I arrived to do my first studio visit with Aurel and might still remain for me her greatest accomplishment. The piece was a life-size bizarro-world portrait of the artist as a young woman; as shy and unassuming as Aurel first seemed, her drawn alter-ego betrayed the fierce and wild woman that I would come to know later. That is not to say her boobs are be composed of snakes and maggots, but rather that her spirit is in touch with elements of the natural and the all-too-human in a way far more sophisticated than her twenty-five years should allow. The "Burnouts" series are conceptual works that probably offered her much needed relief from the marathon drawing works that preceded them. These simple drawings with cigarette burned visages whimsically and disturbingly capture a few of the faces in the daily crowd here: Pretty who blushes daintily with her bloody tampon nose, Boo-boo who smiles gamely through his bleeding Band-Aided blessure, and Sniffy whose jagged, jaw-clenched grimace explains his rolled up bill nostrils. More laughing at us than with us, these works win you over with their elegant simplicity and sensitive drawing. The next series, "Party Monsters," are "Burnouts" gone bad: they are death mask drawings of the cool cool kids club here in New York City. Only if you are awake at 5am on someone's floor or on the bar of LIT or on a slimy street corner downtown are you going to see the subject of these, Aurel's most badass portraits. Influenced by her personal love/hate relationship with the scene and by some of the macho art being made in New York City right now, these pieces run amok with drugs drugs drugs and sex. Barf Bucket Boyfriend illustrates an unpleasant moment in her personal history when a Valentine's Day night went wrong. Bump Blaster Boogey Man illustrates how cocaine and E don't mix. Sleazy the Snowman fiends for another hit. And Pyromaniac Puke Stain just threw his furniture out the window and burned down his apartment. I remember an ex-boyfriend of Aurel's freaking out when a handsome, young collector guy bought the vagina-eyed piece for his house. All her orifices or protuberances are drawn from life, of course, and though this ex was the same dude who "modeled" for her first double dildo drawings, he didn't like this reversal one bit. Funny, too, that Aurel would be embarrassed to go buy a double dildo somewhere but would have no qualms sitting on a mirror to draw her own poon for the public. In addition to earning Aurel her first NC-17 rating, the "Party Monsters" are the first works where she goes crazy with not just drawn debris but also with a new muck bucket of actual body fluids and boot prints to be as bad as she can possibly be. Or maybe not yet? Her "Man Eater" exhibition at Deitch Projects, October 2008, pushes just as many boundaries in subject matter but munches through Modernist masterpieces of painting as well. Gravitating towards the most iconic and most macho, she turned Deitch Projects into a sort of MoMA gone wrong. Maybe as a drawer with a chip on her shoulder from being a practitioner of a "secondary" medium, or maybe just a crazed fan gone wild, Aurel eats up these dudes with her eyes and turns them into trash with her array of pencils. Two of Picasso's hysterical and fucked looking "Weeping Women" from 1937 are her first meal, drawn with writhing serpents where there used to be clutching hands, pink cockroaches pouring down as tears, a jaunty cap of seagulls on one's head and a nematodal grimace full of crushed lipstick teeth on another. CONCERN / FOR SICK TIMES / MOVE YOUR ASS / OR GET SLAMMED / AS ROME BURNS YOU LOSE, reads the headlines nibbled by the weeper in As Rome Burns. The miniscule crumpled type is drawn unbelievably legibly: does Aurel have scanners for eyeballs? TERROR COPS TAKE LIBERTIES: STILL AT RISK reads the crunched piece of newspaper in Weeping Woman's mouth. Perhaps the most disturbing part of this drawing is the intrusion of human-looking teeth into the infested face of centipedes and cigarettes, worms and maggots so dense they swim before your eyes if you look too long. Two of DeKooning's epic "Women" are fed into her shredder next, emerging as vividly colored drawings of debris on the same heroic scale. Pleasantly pink double dildos form the famous double grin of Woman and Bicycle, her imposing pointrine lined with dead rats and car deodorizers. Woman I's gloved hand slips down the front of her unzipped skinny jeans, hyper colored American Apparel-ish pants that eventually divulge her maggoty frog feet stuck together with Band-Aids. This soiled sexualization of a man's disembodied female form to make it a Dionysian overabundance makes me rethink DeKooning's double grin in terms of woman's "second smile" of vaginal lips. Say cheese! In a reduced palette, Aurel takes on Pollock's Number 8, 1949 next. She reconstitutes the poured enamel with fruit loops, dead sparrows, condoms and creepy crawlies, throwing them about as exuberantly as the original spooges of paint. Using color only where Pollock did, a layer of olive green worms form the middle distance. In front of that, a black parade of horseflies march; to the rear, a grey network of smooth soft mice whose tails link up to strings of cigarettes adds another layer of depth, while a bright red all the way to the back comes through with irritated looking houseflies and maggots. This piece is a great example of the layers of viewing involved in Aurel's work: at about six feet you start to see what is going on and the abstraction becomes teemingly alive. At one foot you are either totally repulsed or immediately compelled to assume a one-inch nose-againstplexi proximity at which to examine, say, the albedo of the mouse's eye or the label on a drug bag. What exactly is on that dirty q-tip? You pour over the striations of a snail shell, some loose change, bacon, moist wipes (presumably to clean up after?) an eyelash curler, matches, masticated fried chicken. Some Advil lays ineffectually next to its more powerful prescription brethren Vicoden and Oxycotin, a pacifier sits next to a G-string (size S you notice), bike keys, drink tickets... my hand got tired jotting these notes before I had exhausted its cornucopia. One of the interesting distinctions of Aurel's work is that each dense drawing invites so much ocular athleticism. Your eye sprints and lingers, zooms zooms zooms, pulls out, zeroes in on something else, reads some upside down text, examines ten different animal expressions, gets scared by something out of the corner of its field of vision, looks quickly away from a tampon, looks longingly at a doughnut, cocaine, etc. There is no passive looking available here. The centerpiece of the "Man Eater" show and the terminal work in the "modernist tradition" features and expansive Morris Louis stain painting (Alpha-Phi, 1961) re-imagined on paper. Colorful illusionistically detailed fluids pour from the edges of the work and splash onto the bottom of the paper. The list of materials for this piece reads like the tox report of one screwed up stomach: Indian food mixed with blood, beer, cum, coffee, Listerine and Grape Crush, wine and Comet, plus a little Imodium AD for the indigestion. A true "stain" painting, and thankfully behind glass to enclose the odor, the work's yellowy splash is a stored up cum cascade while the red torrent is made from one period's worth of blood. This is the purging finale of "Man Eater" and a hilarious send-up of the "purity" Clement Greenberg sought in Louis' painting - which I'm sure would have made Greenberg barf a bit, too. So Damn Pure has lots of exciting bits to sniff around for: the sardines swimming down the Listerine waterfall is the most lyrical detail, while the Kool-aid stream filled with hard drugs forms another pour (and another childhood ruined). There is an excellently rendered banana peel, a perfect pickle, a crushed coffee cup: look for yourself! The writer would have loved to have let her entire essay be the long, sick song of Aurel's included imagery. She does not mean to spoil all the fun; she is sorry. In fact, if you look closely, all of Aurel's pieces have smears, tears, ragged blackened edges and thumbed corners. "I love them but at the same time want to destroy them and hurt them," she pleads. Of course she does. What is all this desecration about? Aurel sees the progression of capital Modern Art as chasing a purity that she seeks to problematize. Here, works of art synonymous with progress are reconstituted from the detritus that progress produces. With humor and bad taste, the abject of modernism is made visible, the negated body resurrected - and decomposing. Another work from "Man Eater" helps round out Aurel's dark worldview without any specific reference to the history of art: Mommy, No! is the gnarliest and by far the most disturbingly titled piece. Is this monstrosity in its kiddies pajamas and caricatured single-toothed wail some half-teen, half-child? The milk-filled saggy tits and the blown-out candles suggest it might be a dirty mom instead of a miserable abject baby, but who knows? Women to Aurel are not delicate flowers but are all shitty moms, shitty daughters, sluts, masturbators and drug addicts. And, as we see in this piece, age gets inverted, corrupted and reversed. Beautiful and frightening nature; the beautiful and frightening potential of human nature; Aurel's jungle does not contain a moral judgment. Disgust and shame drive many pieces, while beauty and grace visit others. Her world is in a constant state of decay and renewal where these activities are often indistinguishable. Like Rabelais' grotesque body, Aurel's drawn body and the world within each body are interconnected; the whole and its parts threaten each other equally engaged in constant contest. Her aim to please and her aim to peeve battle within her as well, and as Rabelais famously and scandalously did, Aurel sings a long, dirty song in which all viewers can join in. References Barber, Tim, "They're Going to Hang the Witch" The Journal, vol.7, #20 2007 Baudelaire, Charles. "The Salon of 1859" in Art in Paris, 1845 - 1862, translated and edited Jonathan Mayne, Phaidon 1965. P. 156. Bhaktin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, Indiana University Press, 1984 Cochrane, Lauren, "Follow Your Own Path", i-D. Magazine, February 2007 Critcheloe, Cody, Interview, Loyal Magazine Fall 2008 Fineberg, Joshnathan. Art Since 1940, Prentice Hall, 2nd Ed, 2003 Holiday, Jeff, "Trash and Burn", Nylon Magazine, Fall 2008 Honigman, Ana Finel, "Aurel Schmidt in Conversation with Ana Finel Honigman" www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk, September 21, 2007 McKay-Randozzi, Isaac, www.fecalface.com Interview, May 9, 2006 Melendez, Franklin, "When the World is Smiling," Soma Magazine, vol.21.9, 2007 Taylor, Blair, "Body Swallows World PR", Peres Projects, February 2007 Wordsworth, William, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1798
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