Huge, fuzzy streaks of color traverse five-foot-high sheets of paper in Rosemarie Fiore’s seven “Good-Time Mix Machine: Scrambler Drawing” pieces at Bodybuilder & Sportsman. But for all their bold, colorful beauty they’re strangely unemotional, perhaps because Fiore made them using an amusement park ride, the Scrambler, installed in a warehouse for the purpose. She fastened a sprayer at the bottom of one of the Scrambler’s rotating seats and placed a huge sheet of paper under the ride; these pieces are cut from that sheet. (A video included in the show shows the process.) “I’m interested in popular technology that we all use,” Fiore says.
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Fiore’s dad was an amateur artist who filled their house in a suburb of New York City with his paintings of opera singers. She still remembers her first art project, made when she was about five. “I found a huge bag of cement in my friend’s garage,” she says. “I added water and went outside and got all these sticks and stones and cemented them to the side of the house.” Her friend’s father chipped it off a few hours later. But, she says, “I sort of lost my free impulse” after getting lots of assignments in her art classes.
Fiore spent considerable time looking for the right pinball machine to use for the pieces in a 2001 series, four of which are included here. Eventually she selected Evel Knievel machines, in part because of the way he’d “try to make jumps that he knew he couldn’t do,” she says. She cut paper to the shape of the machine, placed it inside, put paint on the pinballs, and played the game.
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Summer Zandrew
