May 5th, 2008 (Culver City, CA) - Bandini Art is pleased to present Blood and Glitter, curated by Heather Harmon and Ashley McLean Emenegger, and features the artwork of James Gobel, Alejandro Gehry, Carrie Jenkins, Eddie Ruscha, and Michael Shulman.

Blood and Glitter is a group exhibition dealing with artists who express a particular kind of joy in playing with stereotypes of gender, sexuality, punk rock and the psychedelic. The title of the show is drawn from Mick Rock’s book portraying the on-and-off stage lives of musicians such as David Bowie, Freddie Mercury and Iggy Pop. These musicians were among the first to collide the tough individuality of their sounds as musicians with the revolutionary style of their dress as performers, bringing elements of fantasy and reality, lipstick and leather to center stage.

Blood and Glitter speaks to a fluidity of signs, a layering of masculine and feminine distinctions that exist only in the mind of the viewer. Assembled for this exhibition are a group of artists that play the edge between the delicate and the dangerous, the male and the female- reminding us that gender is a social construction that continues to dissolve through music and popular culture. Glam in particular is a mix of theater, sexual ambiguity and decadence, drawing from hippie, and rock genres, science fiction as well as futurism and transvestism.

Artists in the exhibition include Carrie Jenkins, whose seemingly delicate works incorporate elements of femininity and fashion, showing the relationship between identity and getting dressed. In her work, much like a performer or musician, wardrobe is a powerful costume that can change the wearer’s personae as a type of armor. JamesGobel’s brilliant paintings constructed of felt, yarn and fabric play upon the idea of painting and the use of materials that have often been relegated to female crafts. Gobel subverts our expectations combining both masculine and feminine associations through materials and subject matter. MichaelShulman’s documentary photographs of drag queens are shot, printed on canvas and highlighted by hand painted elements, using make up. Shulman produces a doubling of being made up, before the image is shot, and being made up again as the artist devises. EddieRuscha’s paintings reference music, fantasy and counterculture, the very countercultures that have aided the dissolution of various social constructions. Ruscha looks back at the future in a world of sci fi and psychedelia. Alejandro Gehry’s graphic and overtly sexual paintings describe the sensuality of punk rock with the hard edge of painting; lips are intertwined with body parts in ambiguous poses of hedonistic acts. The artists share the contradictions of being bohemian and futuristic embracing rupture and revolution.