Submitted by admin on Thu, 2005-10-13 11:00. ::
Bad-girl Niagara? Sex goddess Niagara? Detroit icon Niagara? The Niagara known for painting women in control, for depicting chicks as mad as hell?
Ready to debut her first C-Pop Gallery solo show in 2 1/2 years Saturday, Niagara has retained some of her most charismatic qualities (audaciousness, seductive mystery and baffling nocturnal instincts) even as she and her art have evolved.
Look closer, and the girls have the same intense, don't-screw-with-me eyes and the same pouty, maraschino cherry mouths as those brash, pistol-wielding, cigarette-loving ladies she painted in the 1990s.
The portraits of drugged women resemble a few paintings of female faces done in the mid-1970s that hang in the living room of her six-bedroom, metro Detroit house.
C-Pop founder Rick Manore likes to say the new work speaks to a more introspective side of Niagara. Like her past efforts, this new series will probably polarize people, he says, but adds "it's much better than being lukewarm."
"This is insane, this is insane," she says, petite hands flying toward an eye-popping green and purple painting in her studio titled "A Fatal Cocktail Party." "This is what I used to paint?"
The paintings explore the escapism associated with drugs, and in some senses, she romanticizes illegal substances. She admits to having tried a lot of them -- codeine, morphine, but not heroin ("I was in a band; it was all part of it.") -- and says she is still a proponent of them, as long as they spur some sort of creative state.
This may not be the most responsible view of drugs, but neither were her girls with guns. But the art, she says, does reflect an aspect of her, including the part of her that is still waiflike with a sweet personality and a certain amount of ambiguity.
The Colonel, who manages the business side, says he didn't like Niagara's new work at first but that people's visceral reactions have changed his perspective.
Along with the opium paintings comes "Beyond the Pale" (9mm Books, $50), a book she describes as not coffee-table but cocktail-table. It's more than 170 pages chronicling the decades of Niagara's artistic and musical creations.
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