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Category: press
Exotic Magazine
August 18, 2004
Roq la Rue Gallery
April 1, 2004
Willamette Week Best Of Portland
January 1, 2004
- BEST COVER GIRL
When we featured local pop artist Miss Mona Superhero’s duct tape drawings
in the April 23 issue of our paper, we knew we’d want to see her Home Depot meets Homeland Security Act psychedelic-induced artwork again.
She’s the perfect example, in the age of Ashcroft, of someone who’s willing to tackle a terror-inducing subject and flip it on its head.
Still, we were a bit surprised when this pioneer of plumber’s-aid portraiture (and longstanding Rose City burlesque legend) accepted our shy plea to create some Mona-riginal art for the cover of Best of Portland 2003. After all, ever since she picked up her X-Acto knife just last winter, Mona’s shiny, hyper kinetic color riots have been in high demand for everything from album art to wall murals. Lucky for us, this gracious cut-and-paste queen (she works only in multicolored tape on white melamine) took on our challenge and came back with her own Portland’s best: a starry, electric, one-woman, two-wheeled wonder. Roller disco, anyone?
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Category: press
Berbati’s Pan
November 6, 2003
Red Ink Studios
May 16, 2003
Willamette Week Picks
April 18, 2003
Mona Superhero is a rising Pop-art superstar whose 15 minutes have officially commenced. In a few short months the self-taught dynamo whipped up a rather extraordinary batch of trippy tableaux rendered in precision-cut duct tape. Multicolored, sliced and diced, overlaid and underlaid in intricate fashion, with dominant central figures surrounded by ornamentation approaching the Byzantine. It’s a gimmicky medium, but these works would turn heads even if they were merely
paintings.
3356 SE Belmont St., 235-6041. Closes April 30. View Mona Superhero’s art online at www.monasuperhero.com.
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Category: press
The Oregonian
April 14, 2003
- Don’t understand this exhibit? Stick with it.
Mona Superhero makes images with Pop, jazz and erotic sources, but look closely; it’s all duct tape.
04/14/03
D.K. ROW
It’s not your usual invitation to see fine art: Hey, Hon, let’s hit that funky little bar in Southeast Portland for a look at some of those duct tape works.
But don’t dismiss the cutting-edge pieces in Portland artist Mona Superhero’s show at the Aalto Lounge this month. Superhero’s images of slinky roller-girls, a silhouette of Miles Davis, voodoo icons with purple vests and sexy Pachinko pinball machine goddesses (ka-ching!) are an eyeful of vivid living color.
The two-dimensional images echo such diverse elements as East Indian movie posters, the sickle-and-hammer designs found in Soviet propaganda and prints of famous album covers. In one work, a Masai warrior hovering above a silhouette of Davis looks eerily like a twisted, more sinister version of the trumpeter’s cover for Bitches Brew.
Superhero finds mind-bending inspiration for her underground artwork, she says, in such comic books as Love and Rockets
and such jazz music as Davis’ Kind of Blue.
But her nutty universe of diverse cultural influences isn’t remarkable solely for the artist’s playful fusion of Pop art, jazz, rock music, erotica and the subterranean milieu of smoky bars and clubs. It’s what the stuff is made of: Look closely and you’ll recognize the grainy, calloused tactility of MacGyver’s indispensable tool: duct tape.
There’s no oil, metal, clay or cameras used in Superhero’s art. Her characters come to life through the rigor of blade and balky tape, a struggle of good-versus-evil proportions: Armed with her X-acto knife, Superhero painstakingly slices out strips and bits of variously colored duct tape onto melamine panels to make amazingly complex relief images and designs.
Rollergirls I,
for instance, depicts two roller-skating phenoms joined at the hip and head, surrounded around by a mini-menagerie of kittens and snakes. It’s one big family album photo, but of a family like few others.
Remember How You Found Me
captures a love fantasia that could have been taken from an Edgar Allan Poe story: two lovers chained at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by several palm like plants. The work, Superhero says, was inspired by a similarly themed song by the rock band Elysian Fields.
With their bright colors and compositional intricacy, Superhero’s works are not a casual throw-off for a draftsman. Making subtle curves and lines as well as tight patterns, details and filigrees with blade and thick clingy tape is a patience-testing task akin to composing a missive by cutting and pasting individual letters from different magazines. It’s a method of madness — or maybe a method toward it.
I have an obsessive-compulsive disorder that allows me to cut tape . . . ,
jokes the 31-year-old Texas native, who says she has worked in law firms, restaurants and as a stripper before making art.
But the images are not the only illusions being spun here. There is also the artist: Mona Superhero is the stage name the artist used as a cult figure in Portland’s cabaret-performance world during the ’90s.
After traveling the country for a few years, Superhero returned recently. She kept her stage name but changed her act. This body of picky-as-pointillism tape work is Superhero’s first fine art exploration and marks a transition from subterranean art star to master of the tape-and-cut form.
With their unorthodox processes and idiosyncratic themes, Superhero’s works are a refreshing release from the belief that art must carry the weight and burden of deep meaning. Put down that encyclopedia and pick up that graphic novel! they cry. Superhero has never studied art or art history. And though the commercial instincts of Andy Warhol and the buzz-saw color palette and symbolism of Peter Max are apparent in these works, the artist deflects any hint that she’s trying for historical or cultural allusions.
I’ve always had a crush on Wolverine — he’s dreamy,
the artist says of the dashing, blade-fingered hero from the X-Men comics.
Ultimately, beyond showing us what she likes to read, listen to and watch, what are these works about? What do these far-out images — which include a woman in sunglasses raising her arms to the heavens, crowned by the dizzying lights of a Pachinko game — say about the artist?
I’m not terribly comfortable . . . a lot of them are reflecting my own paranoia — just being scared of everything . . . being afraid of human interaction.
D.K. Row - dkrow@news.oregonian.com
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Category: press
Aalto Lounge
April 3, 2003
Portland Tribune
April 1, 2003
- Art that sticks to the wall
- By Michaela Bancud
- The Portland Tribune
More proof of duct tape’s endless utility is on display at Mona Superhero’s art show at Aalto Lounge.
Superhero, a denizen of Portland’s underground arts scene, used to perform Miss Mona’s Cabaret Show at places such as Berbati’s Pan and Dante’s Caffe Italiano. Recently, she gave up the stage’s fleeting satisfactions for something she likes better.
The stage has it limits,
she says of the reason behind the switch. Here you can do anything.
The artist, who wears neither cape nor tights, cuts tiny bits and strips of colored duct tape with an X-Acto blade to produce amazingly juicy scenes.
A relative newcomer to the art world, Superhero has had work in group shows at Gallery Bink, a small east-side gallery, in the past. This is her first solo show, but an upcoming feature on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Oregon Art Beat
should raise her profile further.
Like the work of popular ’60s artist Peter Max, Superhero’s punch art has a kind of mad, pinball machine energy. Check out Panic,
in which a bathing-suited rock goddess stands before a pachinko game, or the slightly twisted Siamese Twin Roller Girls.
Duct tape, the artist says, is a
very flexible
medium.
It’s like candy, she says. I think there are about 17 different colors now, but when I first started out I was using just five colors. I just keep finding new ways to have fun with it.
Through April at Aalto Lounge, 3356 SE Belmont Ave.; 503-235-6041.
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Category: press
Gallery Bink
March 1, 2003