At a young age it was determined that Mark Mothersbaugh was incredibly nearsighted and legally blind. At a young age Mothersbaugh started wearing correctional glasses. At a young age Mothersbaugh found and fell in love with art.
He started creating artwork using rubber stamps, screen-printing, decals, ink illustrations and mail art – a small-scale version of Andy Warhol.
Although he received recognition and awards in his hometown of Akron, Ohio, Mothersbaugh’s biggest accomplishment came with Devo a music project that started in college. It was through Devo that Mothersbaugh was able to showcase his artistic abilities, either through costumes, video or printed materials and the band was able to spread their message about the devolution of the human race. He also drew on postcards and sent them to friends but also kept them as a personal diary.
But “Whip It” can only sustain someone for so long and after countless touring, Mothersbaugh and the rest of the group moved onto other projects. Even though the guitarist took side projects creating the theme from Pee Wee’s Playhouse, scores for Wes Anderson movies, such as The Life Aquatic and The Royal Tenenbaums, he still worked on his personal postcards.
Michael Pilmer is the curator of the traveling art exhibit. He first saw Mothersbaugh’s Beautiful Mutants in the mid-90s.
“I asked him what he was going to do with them and he said he wasn’t sure,” said Pilmer. “He thought he was just going to put them into a book or something. [Mothersbaugh] didn’t think they were very good.”
In 2002, Pilmer ended up doing a show for Mothersbaugh in Raleigh, North Carolina as a fluke. Although Pilmer was laid off in the process of planning Mothersbaugh’s show, the artwork sold out and he recruited Pilmer to put together 20-30 shows.
Beautiful Mutants and Mothersbaugh’s Post Card Diary exhibits are on display simultaneously. The Beautiful Mutants have also garnered mass-production of reprints, as well as t-shirts.
Mothersbaugh has visually constructed the notion of the devolution of the human race. It’s called Beautiful Mutants. The works of art are 19th and early 20th century photographs that have been sliced in half and flipped so the image is truly symmetrical, instead of the standard false sense of symmetry.
Beautiful Mutants is also a commentary on the different emotions humans can possess. “Humans tend to have their dark half and a light half in the sense that on the same child or adult one half of their face looks innocent and beautiful. Even with people that are plain looking can sometimes have an innocent half of a face and even beautiful people can have one half of their face look monstrous, malevolent and dark,” said Mothersbaugh in a press release (Mothersbaugh declined to be interviewed). “It’s interesting to see just how the slight shift from two ears that are shaped different to two halves heads of hair being combed the same changed the person to being totally unrecognizable.”
They’re disturbingly beautiful.
Beautiful Mutants is on display at the Paradise Lounge Gallery until November 27. m
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