Fallon Williams: Monday entry (for 2/8/10): Artist of interest: Niagara

Niagara is a female American artist and musician who was born on August 23, 1956 in Detroit, Michigan. She simply goes by the name Niagara. While studying painting at the University of Michigan in the mid 70s, Niagara formed a punk rock band Destroy All Monsters with Mike Kelly. Niagara was the lead singer but she also created promotional posters and album cover art with the use of pen, ink and gouache. Themes in her art work include sexy femme fatales donned with weapons of various sorts. According to Niagara, “I paint real strong women; a Niagara girls [is] revengeful, but she gets her own way...There’s a lot of crime in my paintings.” Niagara's promoter and body guard has explained that Niagara purposely paints off register "to make it look like a bad silk screen but she does it with such precision, people still think they're done by machine. Warhol would love it."

Niagara's most recent exhibit was held in Sydney and Melbourne in 2008 titled The Good, The Bad and The Beautiful. Outre' Gallery created a set of limited edition Niagara silkscreen prints to coincide with the two sold out shows. In 2007 she created a full clothing line with avant garde couturier Hysteric Glamour to coincide with a show she opened in Tokyo in 2007. And in 2008 she collaborated with Vans footwear, in which she designed seven urban-hip inspired shoes that debuted in Paris.

Here is a snippet of Niagara's biography on her officia l website:

Whereas her pictorial style and subjects are indebted in part to the pop masters Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Niagara ascribes her most powerful influences to the Pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau artists Alfons Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley. Her linear technique and application of oriental graphic designs reveal the aesthetic impact of her nineteenth-century predecessors. On her fascination with their predilection for morbid eroticism, she comments “I like all that dark stuff.” Beardsley’s work was characterized by a journalist in 1894 as “the very essence of the decadent fin de siecle.” His images of desire, corruption and death made his conception of “pornotopia” famous among the cultural elite of his day. Now at the close of the millennium, Niagara emerges as the dark angel of decadence whose vision embodies the cynicism that marks the end of our own century.

Interview with Niagara conducted by Pussycat Magazine.

Outre' Gallery in Melbourne, Australia, which held her last exhibition. All of the following images were taken from Outre' Gallery's website.