*extremely art voice* Cindy Sherman and Supreme Are Making Skate Decks
Rather than featuring her portrait film stills, they highlight two of her more unexpected Grotesque Series works.
Cindy Sherman's Supreme skate decks. Photograph courtesy of Supreme.
Just as Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez confirm that their romance is back on, another hot couple emerges: Cindy Sherman and Supreme, who announced this morning that two of Sherman's photographs will appear on skate decks on sale in the brand's stores in the United States and online this Thursday.
But the boards won't feature the Sherman pieces you probably know best, her signature portrait film stills. Instead, Sherman and the skate brand selected two images from her Grotesque Series, which she made in the late 80s when she decided to explore creating narrative photographs without her own image. "I just was nervous that I was too dependent on myself," said Sherman in an audio interview on the Museum of Modern Art's interactive gallery on the series, "and so I wanted to see if I could still tell a story or make an image without depending on myself but it was much harder." In one image to be used by Supreme, "Untitled #175," a massif of half-eaten cupcakes and vomit are sprawled across a teal backdrop, which "suggests a scenario of perhaps bulimia or something gone awry," curator Eva Respini said in the same interview.
The second skate deck image, "Untitled #181," features a similarly "grotesque scenario that suggests very dark narratives," as Respini described the series. Here, a mélange of hot dogs and bulbous chunks of raw meat are plopped with disgusting aplomb among condiments, including ketchup blobs and a sea of whole-grain mustard.
Sherman has had a strong pull on the fashion industry lately: her works were also the genesis of Undercover's Spring 2017 show in Paris, which featured several of those film still portraits on reversible jersey dresses and prim tea frocks.
As for how the collaboration happened or the images were selected, we will probably never know, which seems to be the status quo in this cold and senseless world but is also characteristic for the cryptic skate brand. The Supreme website announcement offers: "Known for her cinematically composed self-portraits as invented characters, Sherman's work explores the stereotypes of female iconography in popular culture and female identity in society."
Sherman joins a long list of artists who have collaborated with Supreme on skate decks, which sometimes entail special designs, such as Ryan McGuinness's Pantone series from 2000 or Jeff Koons's cartoony monkeys in 2006, and in other cases, see the artist's works placed directly on the boards, such as this collaboration with Sherman or, in another legendary favorite, 2002's "Last Supper" boards.
Many of those collaborations often include clothing, but this one is limited to decks only, which means we will never see a vomit-print hoodie on Supreme mega-fan Scott Disick. The only wish that could possibly remain in this Cindy Sherman Fashion Trend world is for the artist to take one of her loopy-goopy selfies with the boards for her Instagram.
