Aurel Schmidt - Burn Outs - 2007

Great little book by Aurel schmidt.
Signed and burned by Aurel.

Deitch Projects presented a one-night exhibition and book release for a new body of works by Aurel Schmidt. Ms. Schmidt created thirteen drawings using cigarettes burns, pencil, acrylic, colored pencil, and even blood to create unique and disturbing faces.

In this series, Ms. Schmidt’s pieces focused on the gross, neglected, or overlooked objects of daily life: the visceral, the sexual, the shameful, and the profane. Using an iconic Mr. Smiley simple face as a jumping-off point, Ms. Schmidt made eyes out of toilet paper rolls, a nose from Band-Aids and blood, and a mouth of discarded banana peel. A bloody tampon delineated the nose of Pretty, whose soft blush only threw her red nose into starker relief. Lynda, an homage to Lynda Benglis, the iconic ‘80s feminist artist who posed with a big dildo, who here grinned a big pink double-dong. Sniffy’s jaggedly intense grin was explained by the two rolled up bills he has as a nose; Musk’s bewildered mask of (inferably) odoriferous panties helped explain his or her perplexed little gasp of a mouth; an unpleasant cocktail of prescription pills seemed to have caused the intense, blank anguish of Push N Turn’s burned mouth; and Boo Boo seemed a gung-ho lad who, despite a band-aided bleeding nose, smiled optimistically.