Eric Firestone is pleased to announce a summer group show “Nose Job,” curated by Carlo McCormick. With a sly wink to Warhol’s iconic early Sixties image “Before and After” in which he appropriated and altered a plastic surgery ad for a nose job to comment on our culture’s ideals of beauty, Nose Job is in fact a tribute to the old vernacular folk-art form of nose art dating from both World Wars in which soldiers painted images and slogans on the noses of military planes. Firestone and McCormick began the project by scouring t... Read more

Eric Firestone is pleased to announce a summer group show “Nose Job,” curated by Carlo McCormick. With a sly wink to Warhol’s iconic early Sixties image “Before and After” in which he appropriated and altered a plastic surgery ad for a nose job to comment on our culture’s ideals of beauty, Nose Job is in fact a tribute to the old vernacular folk-art form of nose art dating from both World Wars in which soldiers painted images and slogans on the noses of military planes. Firestone and McCormick began the project by scouring the ‘bone yards’ of the Arizona desert where the old disused airplanes of America’s air force go to die and collected a wide range of nose cones from these planes in various shapes and sizes. The pair invited an array of contemporary artists to transform these curious relics into objects of art. What started as a mere whim found deep resonance in the creative community as many artists have their own associations and inspirations from the legacy of nose art. Among those who have already agreed to participate are; Aiko, Dan Colen, Peter Dayton, Viejas Del Mercado, Jane Dickson, Shepard Fairey, Futura, How & Nosm, Juan James, Ryan McGuinness, Tara McPherson, Nunca, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Lee Quinones, Carlos (MARE 139) Rodriguez, Retna, Saner, Kenny Scharf, Shelter Serra, Swoon, JJ Veronis and Aaron Young. Nose Job is a subversive update of art’s role in the collective imagination of this dream of flying in an era of increasing discomfort, delays and dread. The show is simultaneously an act of aesthetic recycling, a reinterpretation of a self-taught visionary art form that both borrowed from and contributed to the course of American popular culture (with imagery that ran the gamut from pin-up girls and tattoo designs to comic and cartoon figures), and a present-day invocation of humanity’s timeless fascination with flight. Call it a case of post-modern jetlag, but it is a short trip from the prescient drawings of an air-born man by Leonardo da Vinci or Alexander Calder’s painted aircrafts for Braniff Airlines, which like the magic of travel today can also take us to some place utterly unfamiliar.