Dame Darcy, New York-based performance artist, musician and creator of the popular comic book Meat Cake, is
asking her audiences to do more than just suspend their disbelief. She
wants them to redraw their paradigm and shed their assumptions about
what's real, possible and normal.
Her latest graphic novel, Gasoline, will be released at an art show tonight at Sloan Fine Art. Gasoline is a work of fiction, but Darcy sees it as a prophecy just as much. Its characters were dreamed up, she says, but its circumstances are soon to become very real. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, where gasoline has run out and a small family of witches must contend in an urban wasteland haunted by nihilists. Darcy isn't shy about the story's political message.
"Gasoline and the whole patriarchal society, and everything that has been set up by technology, are starting to fail us, and we need to go back to the mother," she says. "Gasoline was written to inspire people to think about alternatives: practicing magic and seeing the magic in themselves, downplaying consumerism, coming up with their own answers to things."
It sounds like the same stern predictions we've heard time and again -- the end of oil, a new Urbanism, sustainability by necessity, the emergence of dormant magical powers in a post-technological society where witches thrive over their former oppressors. But no, that last part -- I'm pretty sure that hasn't been part of the dialogue so far.
"Everybody in Gasoline is a witch," Darcy says. "My friend found this book about the Mayan calendar, and it sort of explains 2012 and the whole way that Mayans operated. There's a lot of evidence that they could time travel, that they communicated with aliens, that they had ties to Atlantis, that they were part of the fairyland and they could simultaneously exist in different universes, which is where Gasoline takes place."
After the Mayan calendar ends, everybody who is a witch at that point ... is going to be at an advantage -- then as well as now, because technology is starting to fail us."
Darcy believes that modern will re-form into a civililzation akin to the Mayans', or to the lost city of Atlantis, which appears often in her dreaming life. Darcy puts a lot of stock in her dreams. The plot, setting and characters of Gasoline are transposed, almost directly, from a dream that she had.
She dreamt that New York would get bombed, the gasoline would run out, and she would have to create a Utopian society. "I was also told by the dream," says Darcy, "that I would have to leave New York, where I had lived since '92, and go to Los Angeles so I could learn what the apocalypse was all about."
She found survivalist compounds -- renegade communities of outsiders living off the grid -- in Malibu and Pasadena which mirror the settlement "Croy" in Gasoline. One of the was a perfect match for the society she had dreamed of.
"It looked exactly like what i wanted, meaning that it had a giant fire pit shaped like a vagina and huge Grecian pillars overlooking the ocean," she says. "It had statues of weird angels and saints and mermaids and russians with beards that looked like god. ... Everything's all beautiful Rococo furniture, but it's all been sort of weathered and destroyed by years on top of this mountain."
The surreal drawings in Gasoline, then, have real-life counterparts in the fantastical west. Many of them will be on display at Sloan Fine Art at tonight's reception, and at the exhibition which runs through December 20. A Gasoline feature film, for which Darcy recorded all the music, is also in the making.
Darcy bills the whole franchise as "a post-apocalyptic rock 'n' roll fairytale" or "a post-apocalyptic rock opera about witches that live in a sustainable society." I can't help but sense some semiotic schizophrenia here. Darcy obviously believes very earnestly in the mystical reality she depicts, but her promotional material bears the unmistakable mark of irony (In a trailer video, she offers witches' spells "from the EZ-Bake coven.").
Her response to this query was either evasive or -- I can't decide which -- necessarily indirect.
"In a way," she says, "I think that American culture is ironic. We kind of live in a clown world. We killed all the natives of this land, we demolished them and destroyed them, we demolished the land itself and any indigenous structures, and then we built these giant clownish structures that are bright blue and yellow, like Wal-Mart. And then they sell clown food like hot dogs and coke, and they sell them to people wearing clown clothes -- big bright outfits, because they're fat.
"So yeah, making a movie that's about rock 'n' roll and about cars and all this stuff is using American language so that i can show America in a different way, because I understand that I too am an American and I have to talk like them for them to get it."
Is she saying, then, that in order to reach people she has to use myth and archetype? She has to explode the quotidian into the fantastical?
"Gore put out his movie An Inconvenient Truth," Darcy replies, "and it scared people. It was a science movie put out by a patriarch, and he means well, but it didn't really offer any optimism, and it didn't really offer any characters that people could connect with.
"Everything that I do is an analogy, like a fairytale analogy, but I'm just speaking in facts. I'm speaking in what I know and what I believe to be true, but I'm doing it in archetypes and symbolism."
Her latest graphic novel, Gasoline, will be released at an art show tonight at Sloan Fine Art. Gasoline is a work of fiction, but Darcy sees it as a prophecy just as much. Its characters were dreamed up, she says, but its circumstances are soon to become very real. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, where gasoline has run out and a small family of witches must contend in an urban wasteland haunted by nihilists. Darcy isn't shy about the story's political message.
"Gasoline and the whole patriarchal society, and everything that has been set up by technology, are starting to fail us, and we need to go back to the mother," she says. "Gasoline was written to inspire people to think about alternatives: practicing magic and seeing the magic in themselves, downplaying consumerism, coming up with their own answers to things."
It sounds like the same stern predictions we've heard time and again -- the end of oil, a new Urbanism, sustainability by necessity, the emergence of dormant magical powers in a post-technological society where witches thrive over their former oppressors. But no, that last part -- I'm pretty sure that hasn't been part of the dialogue so far.
"Everybody in Gasoline is a witch," Darcy says. "My friend found this book about the Mayan calendar, and it sort of explains 2012 and the whole way that Mayans operated. There's a lot of evidence that they could time travel, that they communicated with aliens, that they had ties to Atlantis, that they were part of the fairyland and they could simultaneously exist in different universes, which is where Gasoline takes place."
After the Mayan calendar ends, everybody who is a witch at that point ... is going to be at an advantage -- then as well as now, because technology is starting to fail us."
Darcy believes that modern will re-form into a civililzation akin to the Mayans', or to the lost city of Atlantis, which appears often in her dreaming life. Darcy puts a lot of stock in her dreams. The plot, setting and characters of Gasoline are transposed, almost directly, from a dream that she had.
She dreamt that New York would get bombed, the gasoline would run out, and she would have to create a Utopian society. "I was also told by the dream," says Darcy, "that I would have to leave New York, where I had lived since '92, and go to Los Angeles so I could learn what the apocalypse was all about."
She found survivalist compounds -- renegade communities of outsiders living off the grid -- in Malibu and Pasadena which mirror the settlement "Croy" in Gasoline. One of the was a perfect match for the society she had dreamed of.
"It looked exactly like what i wanted, meaning that it had a giant fire pit shaped like a vagina and huge Grecian pillars overlooking the ocean," she says. "It had statues of weird angels and saints and mermaids and russians with beards that looked like god. ... Everything's all beautiful Rococo furniture, but it's all been sort of weathered and destroyed by years on top of this mountain."
The surreal drawings in Gasoline, then, have real-life counterparts in the fantastical west. Many of them will be on display at Sloan Fine Art at tonight's reception, and at the exhibition which runs through December 20. A Gasoline feature film, for which Darcy recorded all the music, is also in the making.
Darcy bills the whole franchise as "a post-apocalyptic rock 'n' roll fairytale" or "a post-apocalyptic rock opera about witches that live in a sustainable society." I can't help but sense some semiotic schizophrenia here. Darcy obviously believes very earnestly in the mystical reality she depicts, but her promotional material bears the unmistakable mark of irony (In a trailer video, she offers witches' spells "from the EZ-Bake coven.").
Her response to this query was either evasive or -- I can't decide which -- necessarily indirect.
"In a way," she says, "I think that American culture is ironic. We kind of live in a clown world. We killed all the natives of this land, we demolished them and destroyed them, we demolished the land itself and any indigenous structures, and then we built these giant clownish structures that are bright blue and yellow, like Wal-Mart. And then they sell clown food like hot dogs and coke, and they sell them to people wearing clown clothes -- big bright outfits, because they're fat.
"So yeah, making a movie that's about rock 'n' roll and about cars and all this stuff is using American language so that i can show America in a different way, because I understand that I too am an American and I have to talk like them for them to get it."
Is she saying, then, that in order to reach people she has to use myth and archetype? She has to explode the quotidian into the fantastical?
"Gore put out his movie An Inconvenient Truth," Darcy replies, "and it scared people. It was a science movie put out by a patriarch, and he means well, but it didn't really offer any optimism, and it didn't really offer any characters that people could connect with.
"Everything that I do is an analogy, like a fairytale analogy, but I'm just speaking in facts. I'm speaking in what I know and what I believe to be true, but I'm doing it in archetypes and symbolism."
