Second Street Gallery is pleased to present Subculture Shock: Death, Punk & the Occult in Contemporary Art. The exhibition featured the work of Jessicka Addams of Los Angeles, Peter Benedetti, Paul Brainard, Evie Falci, and Tamara Santibañez of New York City, Porkchop, a VCU grad who now lives and works in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and Danish artist, Frodo Mikkelsen.

Subculture Shock examines each artist’s connection to subculture and the impact it has had on their work. The installation aims to fuse each artist’s unique media and genres into a coherent artistic expression that explores themes of punk rock, propaganda, death, self-mythology, and the occult. The exhibition opened to the public on First Friday, September 6, from 5:30-7:30pm.

Jessicka Addams is a Florida-born, Los Angeles-based femme outsider artist fascinated with Goth culture, all things John Waters, Louis Wain, rainbows, ghosts, and cats. Each work is carefully archived: grief here, betrayal there, and the loss of the people closest to her. Throughout her exploration of identity, vulnerability, and loss, Jessicka maintains an element of childhood innocence and humor that slightly lightens the heaviness of her melancholy sculptures and paintings. Jessicka is also the founding member and singer of seminal indie rock bands "Jack Off Jill" and "scarling". While continuing to create artwork, ‪Jessicka is working on a children’s book and writing an animated feature film. 

Peter Alexander Benedetti is an artist from Brooklyn specializing in mixed media painting and digital illustration. After graduating with a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, he developed his vision by creating a prolific body of work that has been exhibited in a number of galleries in New York and across the country. From an early age Benedetti was drawn to all things eccentric in both art and life, and this predilection for difference and unconventional expression has influenced his craft, leading him to find inspiration in the extremes of those who cultivate.

Paul Brainard was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he studied at the University of Pittsburgh for a Bachelor’s degree in painting and drawing with a minor in Art History and Psychology. After studying at the Carnegie Institute Museum studio school, he moved to New York in 1996 to attend the Pratt Institute where he received his MFA in painting and drawing. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Internationally at the Second Street Gallery (Charlottesville, VA), Lodge Gallery (NYC), 31 Grand Gallery (NYC), Freight and Volume and Arts and Leisure (NYC), Dietch Projects (NYC) Allegra LaViola Gallery (NYC) Guerrero Gallery (SF) and Andrew Edlin Gallery (NYC). In 2010 his European debut solo show "Living Dead" at Dvorak Sec Gallery in Prague was well received and reviewed. In January 2018, he showed at Galleri Oxholm in Copenhagen. He has also curated many painting shows in New York, "Totally Gay for Sports" (2013) at the Lodge Gallery, "True Faith" (2007) and "Breed" (2011) at the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, and "Die like you really mean it" at Allegra LaViola Gallery in 2011.

Evie Falci is a 2007 graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland. She was selected as an artist in residence for the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program in 2011–2012. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions at various venues, including: Asya Geisburg Gallery, The Seligmann Center, The Kentucky Museum of Art and Crafts, Danese Corey Gallery, The Hole Gallery, Eric Firestone Gallery, Gallery Zurcher, Jeff Bailey Gallery, and Feature Inc. Recent solo shows include "Veils" at Castor Gallery, "Voids and Invocations" at The Lodge Gallery, and "Everything All Night" at Jeff Bailey Gallery. Her work has been written about in publications that include White Wall Magazine, Interview Magazine, NY Arts Magazine, and Into The Gloss. Her work is part of the permanent collection of Art in Embassies, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She continues to live and work in Brooklyn, NY.

Frodo Mikkelsen is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mikkelsen’s paintings, sculpture, and prints explore themes of life and mortality and its relationship with the natural world that surround him. His work is included in a number of major private and museum collections such as The ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark, the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Mikkelsen is a member of the BKF (Danish Artist Union), the DG Danske Grafikere (Danish Printmakers Society), and the Dansk billedhugger samfund (Danish Sculpture Society).

Porkchop is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Asbury Park, New Jersey. He has a MFA in Sculpture from VCU. Porkchop has had a successful career designing and creating murals, mixed media art, and sculpture. He creates intriguing scenarios by combining paint, illustration, and text. He has exhibited exclusively in the United States and Europe and is published in “The Greatest Erotic Art of Today/Volume 2", "Eye Candy" and "I Want Your Skull". Influenced by ancient block printing techniques, history and literature, Porkchop sources out, manipulates, and casts familiar objects. He then painstakingly recreates their surfaces giving them a new existence into a dark and curious storyline. The application of paint into his intentional ritualistic designs followed by flawless coats of glossy resin is an act of pure precision and care, like the work of a surgeon or mortician.

Tamara Santibañez is a multimedia artist living and working in Brooklyn. Their work is rooted in subcultural semiotics, exploring the meanings we assign to materials, accessories and objects. Drawing from the worlds of fetish, punk, Chicanx art, and tattooing, they probe the weight objects hold as symbols and the ways in which style-based cultural signifiers function as shorthand for a coded communication. As a tattoo artist working at the legendary Saved Tattoo, Santibañez is widely known for their innovative combination of Chicanx imagery with queer fetish iconography. They were recently featured in an article on work of contemporary Latinx artists the New York Times. 

EXHIBITION SPONSORS

This exhibition is made possible in part by Six Hundred West Main and Ivy Naté.