At Seagull Salon we have added a few choice selections from Kevin Murphy's gorgeous line of hair care and styling products to our arsenal. Modern packaging in a color palette we love (obviously), and sexy unisex scents. The lovely mint boxes of EASY.RIDER are flying off our shelves as a grooming cream for short cuts and naturally curly hair. HAIR.RESORT is for windblown lions' manes, and FRESH.HAIR is kinda like febreeze for hair! Stop by the salon to sample or buy them here.
Johanna,
Ok, the first 2 pictures are actually from Halloween Part I, but somehow we missed them. Sorry kids! And sorry we caught you, Bonnie, Clyde, Dracula, & Li'l Amy Winehouse, in the flash!
While the rest of us New Yorkers are securing our winter gear and buckling down for a cold spell, Shaun is lost in South Beach, Miami galavanting around at night with the snake men and fire eaters on Ocean Drive. More on that in a minute... Meanwhile he spending his days at the Vidal Sassoon academy of South Beach Miami learning some wicked good precision cutting skilz. Hoping to bring back some Sassoon technique into his otherwise goddess given/Mad genius know how to a NYC hair salon, he has his nose in the books and his eyes on the prize as teachers favorite. His mentor at Sassoon is Joeseph who can make some crazy shit happen with hair.
That's Joeseph up there looking like a real profesh cutter. Shaun's mind is being bent to snapping point as he never really learned "technique" he just kinda has the magic... But the two elements combined will create what will for sure be an unstoppable force the likes NYC has never seen.
Now to the good stuff...
SO... There's this guy playing spanish guitar versions of "Easy like sunday morning" and "Hotel California" at a restaurant in the Beacon Hotel on Ocean drive with a wind machine blowing his hair. How could Shaun resist?
This is what he ate. A nice tender piece of meat with a scalloped potato thing that was kind of really the most amazing thing ever. We weren't expecting this good for South Beach but it turned out great.
And, even though this is SO South Beach Miami; Mojitos as big as yer head for sharing or unmentionable behaviors, Shaun just couldn't do it... When a cocktail makes you feel like yer an infant getting yer picture taken in an oversized chair at the fair, well... It's time to go home.
XO, Shaun, Seagull
Hair Salon Downtown Manhattan NYC, 10014
It's true that Halloween is not officially until tomorrow, but let's face it, if you are a kid Halloween pretty much starts around October 15 and lasts until your candy runs out. Trick or treating at Seagull began last Saturday since we are a proud participating merchant in the Bleecker Street playground Children's Festival. We would like think we were a real landmark, a highlight, a very special stop on the after-party candy crawl as we placed no limits on the amount of candy kids took from us. That's right, NO LIMITS!! Take a big handful! We're doing it again tomorrow! Here are some snapshots of our trick-or-treaters:
After a second, failed attempt to institute the "Seagull, Orchid adoption program" we decided to turn the otherwise expired foliage into interactive performance art outside on the stub of what used to be our lamp post. Lots of confusion and Seagulls pretending we didn't know either.
XO, Shaun, Seagull
This last friday, I joined Johanna Fateman and Lia Gangitano at Participant Inc. for an afternoon of gallery crawling. First off, we checked out the show Lia put together at Participant; My Barbarian, The night epi$ide. A four screen interactive song and dance, narrative performance that was fun and creepy.
Then we were off to Reena Spauling fine art Gallery to see K8 Hardy's photo exhibition; TO all the G#%$! I've Loved Before.
Johanna W/Goldie and Lia.
One of K8 Hardy's self-portraits.
Then it was off to Invisible Exports to see 30 Years of Being Cut Up. A retrospective of the collage work of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. This show was a little naughty. It was good to see the Mail art and collage work all in one place.
XO, Shaun, Seagull
Here We go again! Kate Hardy video artist, sometimes fashion stylist and Seagull muse has caught New York's attention once again with her photo exhibition currently showing at Reena Spauling's Fine Art Gallery. Check it out, you'll find us there.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/fashion/01hardy.html
Michael Nagle for The New York Times
ROLE PLAYER K8 Hardy, on the rooftop of her studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Her fashion sensibilities have been featured in her zine and are on display at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, a gallery in Chinatown. More Photos >
FASHION is the Rodney Dangerfield of culture. It don’t get no respect. We take unconscious cues from it; make art about it; base movies, plays and media franchises on it (some with the half life of plutonium, viz. “Sex and the City”); mine satire from it, and draw pleasure from its basic productions — that is, clothes. Yet still, fashion gives people the willies.
Her fashion sensibilities are on display at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, a gallery in Chinatown. More Photos »
“Fashion makes people nervous,”Anna Wintour observes in the Vogue documentary, “The September Issue,” and on this point, as on many others about a misunderstood business, Ms. Wintour is correct.
But wait. Perhaps this is a good thing. Maybe fashion is a stealth tool of cultural critique. That would appear to be the premise underlying the art of K8 Hardy, a 31-year-old video artist, founder of the queer feminist art collective LTTR, occasional fashion stylist, creator of the cult zine FashionFashion and an inveterate shape-shifter whose first one-woman show of photographs opened this month.
The images on view at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, a gallery in a former Chinatown brothel, echo the wardrobe mash-ups in Ms. Hardy’s zine that first caught the attention of both fashion’s early adopters and the curatorial set.
Last year, the Tate Modern commissioned Ms. Hardy to create a project based on FashionFashion and, taking a cue from the steroidal art productions of contemporary male artists, she blew her little homemade magazine up to Brobdingnagian size. Laser printed and hand folded, both primitive and surprisingly slick, FashionFashion features Ms. Hardy and occasionally a friend or her older sister, Halie, dressed in thrift shop clothes styled with unfettered brio, striking provocative and sometimes raunchy poses that are, as she noted, “quite popular” on the Internet.
“I didn’t grow up wearing designer clothes or luxury anything,” Ms. Hardy noted last week at her gallery. “You wouldn’t really say I have any kind of background in fashion.”
But she was raised in Texas, where, as she put it, “the rigors of personal appearance” and self-presentation are considerable. And while it’s a cliché as blatant as big hair, it is also true, Ms. Hardy said, that the emphasis Texans place on creating and projecting a persona through clothes provided her with solid training in analysis of “the social play and political function of dress.”
That sounds theoretically fancy, but K8 Hardy (she pronounces her first name “Kate”) is anything but. Her witty work has led to collaborations with bands like Le Tigre and Fischerspooner, and a collaboration with the designers JF & Son on a new collection she calls My Favorite Things. Its evolution begins with that most common and currently disreputable of activities — shopping.
Like many artists before her (Joseph Cornell comes to mind), Ms. Hardy loves to thrift. “I’m obsessed,” she said. She was dressed in pleated trousers with a neon belt, a print blouson and granny shoes, no article bought at full price. Even with her naturally brown hair bleached platinum she seemed too chic to bear much resemblance to some of her more outlandish creations: a demented flight attendant, say, or a housewife clown.
“I thrift everywhere,” she said. “It’s an addiction.”
And everywhere K8 Hardy goes, the thrift stores have something different to offer: Western wear in Texas, outerwear in the Northeast, Sansabelt trousers in Florida. One favorite route is through Queens, where she scours the charity shops in Sunnyside for Issey Miyake capes and sweater sets, and in Jackson Heights for clothes discarded by members of the area’s newly prosperous immigrant groups.
“I’m interested in the weirdest things,” she said. “I like to find cool day wear, of course, but I’m more interested in bizarre pieces, clothes that don’t make sense.”
Ms. Hardy’s obsession with thrift shops is only partly about the garments she puts to the service of her art. Combing through other people’s castoffs, she explained, also satisfies a narrative mania. “I love looking at clothes, thinking about who wore them, looking at the textiles, the tags. The amount of hours I’ve spent is like a college education. It’s ridiculous.”
Or it would be if not for the shrewd, affecting and occasionally raunchy personas she conjures from the stuff of other people’s closets, outfits she assembles and photographs mainly on herself.
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In her zine, a kente cloth vest might be worn with lime green hot pants, a brocade pillbox hat and a string of necklaces made from iPod jacks. An ice-blue satin dress with padded shoulders is turned inside out and worn as a skirt, the disturbingly sexual nude-colored pads inverted above the hip. A mesh tank striped in the colors of the Jamaican flag, paired with leopard tights and a raucously tropical man’s blazer, is worn by the artist Ramdasha Bikceem, her gang-style chest tattoo proudly exposed. A matronly power suit is matched with an Homburg reminiscent of Williamsburg Hasidim and a sad wig that resembles silver tinsel.
Unlike other artists whose materials come from the wardrobe — Cindy Sherman, Leigh Bowery, Yong Soon Min or Nikki S. Lee — Ms. Hardy seems less interested in making commentary on body morphology or the tensions between mainstream and minority cultures than in teasing out the subtle emotional meanings latent in clothes. “This blanket expression that you shouldn’t judge a person by their clothes is ridiculous to me,” she said. “Every article of clothing is so loaded with signifiers, I don’t know how you can help but make up stories about people and their desires based on what they wear.”
That these stories, freighted with images drawn from people’s apparel, may not correlate with truth is also of interest to Ms. Hardy. A self-described lesbian feminist with punk sensibilities and a solid grounding in queer activism, she is at home with “rampant multiplicities of identity,” as she put it, with poses and masks.
In her photographic and video work, she has been a boy, a drag queen, a socialite, a biker chick, a Chicana and a hipster stylist. “Why settle for one identity,” Ms. Hardy said, “when there are all these multiples” of representation available?
“I’ve been changing my look all my life,” she said.
Growing up in conservative Fort Worth, raised by a single mother in a household that included her sister and a twin brother, Ms. Hardy “became aware really early of the desire to try and pull a reaction out of people and make a statement,” she said.
By 13, she was already rejiggering her look on a regular basis. “In my junior high we weren’t allowed to wear cutoff jeans and I didn’t understand the politics of that,” she said. Her reaction was to dress one week as a rodeo queen, in high-waist Rocky Mountain jeans and cowboy boots, and as a hippie the next week, in tie-dyed shirts, long skirts and fake Birkenstocks.
Her shape-shifting came in handy when she arrived in New York afterSmith College and Bard, prepared to build an art career in the usual way, by becoming an art assistant or a temp. “I didn’t have any artistic practice that could sustain a living,” Ms. Hardy explained.
She did have a friend, though, who thought she might have a knack for styling and who put her in touch with the fashion photographerSteven Klein. “I was on the set playing fake-it-till-you-make-it,” she said. “I had no idea who Steven Klein was. I didn’t even know Armani.”
She did know, instinctively, how to juxtapose disparate elements of a wardrobe in a way that was attuned to a moment in both fashion and culture that favors collage. When Holland Cotter, a New York Times art critic, referred in 2005 to Ms. Hardy’s blend of “childhood make-believe, 1960s activism, 1970s feminism, queer politics, the cult of narcissism,” he also noted a loopy humor that adds liveliness to work that might otherwise risk seeming trite.
Without her raunchy spirit, her sense of humor and D.I.Y. pluck, Ms. Hardy could easily have become mired in a theoretical bog suggested by a manifesto decrying “self-righteousness, conformism, complacency and barren professionalism” as the enemies of art. Happily, she seems to spend more time in hunting down treasures in thrift shops than dog-eared copies of Deleuze at the Strand.
“I prefer to make the art first and analyze it later,” she said brightly. “I like to feel like as if I’m making it up.”
xo, Shaun, Seagull
Coming soon to the Seagull website! A look-book for hairstyles made famous in New York City. This inspiration board is coming soon and will feature many of the the most iconic NYC hairstyles throughout recent decades. Pixie cuts, Shags, Heavy bangs and Mod Bouffants. From Twiggy to Jane Birkin and other NYC dwellers, every vintage New York cut and style will be represented to give you ideas and starting points for your own styles and cuts when you come to Seagull... Not that our team needs it, but it will be a fun jumping off point to inspire your next style!
So I've been watching more videos lately (MGMT, Friendly Fires) and I'm seeing a lot of 1 dimensional collage-like visual art and it's all base on a mix of Edward Gorey and this;
