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 materialized
on the scene in the late 70's as front person for
the noise band DESTROY ALL MONSTERS.Fellow band mates read like a who's who, including Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw (big time artists), Ron Asheton (Iggy and the Stooges guitarist), Mike Davis (MC5 bass player). Niagara took Destroy all Monsters from noise to punk in the 80's. Aside from singing and self-destructive stage  habits, Niagara
designed the
band's posters, singles and album art.While D.A.M was performing on stage at the Second Chance in Ann Arbor, Madonna was waiting on tables. Indeed, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde borrowed from the Niagara punk prototype. Her presence was described in Rolling Stone as "a cocktail of Valium, Tuinal and Nervine" and Spin wrote her " laissez-faire delivery carries much more punch than a conventional Her early cover art, done in pen & ink and gouache, appear to be self portraits. Her fierce female depictions of femme fatales plumb the depths of trash culture. "It's the men who cry in my paintings," Niagara muses. She later showed "Warholistic" use of colour on her large canvases and actually met Andy Warhol in the late 70's. Colonel Galaxy, Niagara's promoter/body guard comments, "Niagara 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 works with C-POP Gallery in Detroit in tandem with Rick Manore and of late Tom Thewes. She also sings with DARK CARNIVAL with lead guitarist, Ron Asheton. Look for annual Niagara art shows in New York, L.A. and elsewhere. Also Dark Carnival can be seen here and there, now and then. (including Europe, Australia etc.). Niagara has said that she started performing so that "people would leave me alone".  Niagara’s lethal beauties, accessorized with guns and switchblades, make no apologies and leave no survivors. She amplifies her subjects with bitingly humorous captions like: I Lied, Over Your Dead Body, Geisha This and Here’s For Your Bad Manners. “I paint real strong women; a Niagara girls [is] revengeful, but she gets her own way,” the artist explains and adds matter-of-factly, “There’s a lot of crime in my paintings.” Criminal violence is emblematic of the artist’s Detroit home, but her voluptuous felons may jolt Washingtonian sensibilities. Even so, viewers are bound to find her glamorous she-clones more charming and less abrasive than their maladjusted pulp-film cohorts and Niagara thwarts the possibility of her malevolent heroines eliding with the objective world by emphasizing their pictorial status. Exploiting the flatness of her media, she abstracts textures and compresses figures and backgrounds into precisely cropped frames, constructing a format which gives the unmistakable impression that the Niagara Woman and her occasional antagonists are the only personae that could possibly inhabit their borders. Niagara’s painting and graphic techniques are as strong and appealing as the characters to which they give being. With fluid lines and gracefully contoured areas of bold color she composes tightly-constructed and harmoniously balanced designs. Her crisp, fresh and immediate pictures demonstrate her aesthetic philosophy: “I don’t care about making art that only talks to other artists.” Her artistic career began in the 1970s when she studied painting at the University of Michigan. Soon thereafter she invented her signature “Niagara Woman.” While living in Ann Arbor she sang in the chaotic punk band Destroy All Monsters, which included fellow art students Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, both of whom, like her, are accomplished artists. Niagara now presides as the lead singer of Dark Carnival, a Detroit-based post-punk band that toured Europe and Australia in the mid-90s. As the band’s lyric writer, she delivers ominous verses that resonate the invective of her pictorial creations in songs like “Let There Be Dark”. “A lot of the paintings have the same kind of attitude as the lyrics,” the artiste-auteur observes and elaborates, “It’s a lot about drinking and drugs and being snotty.” Whether her art imitates her life, or vice versa, Niagara is her own creation. 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. |
© 2004 Niagara :: All Rights Reserved Copyright owned by Niagara. Reproduction in any form, including electronic media, will be granted with written permission from Niagara only. Image cannot be electronically modified, copied, cropped or altered in any way, shape or form. Illegal copyright will result in prosecution to the fullest extent. |