Nicole Briese

Friday the 13th. Standing before a thick black curtain, expectations are high. What’s on the other side is death. Take the plunge, pull the curtain back. A computer mouse. Of death.

At the interactive "Notions of Death" art exhibit on 18th street, art enthusiasts pick their demise—with the click of a button. Disaster? Animal Attack? Murder? The choice is yours. More options follow—tornado, please. After selecting a method of death, one of three performers (your choice, of course) reads a small piece while her image is projected onto a screen, presumably naked with open, unseeing eyes. They are gently closed by a gloved hand as she speaks. "There’s the biting, that’s one thing, but getting in there, feeling the flesh beyond the teeth…you know the drill," one unfortunate shark-bite victim relates. Other monologues are more to the point, consisting of only gasps or screams. A stabbing victim points to her multiple "wounds," chanting, "here, here, here, here…"

Written by Todd Frugia, the idea for the exhibit came from an unlikely source. "Strangely enough, I was reading a Buddhist text about the idea of death being a notion," he says. "[I thought,] what if we gave the audience a plethora of notions?"

And so the audience is welcomed to the driver’s seat, a small table in the center of the room, some shy at first, but most eventually sauntering over. "I was very interested in audience interaction with multimedia," Frugia says. "It’s like working with a DVD player, [except] a live person comes out and helps you."

The "live people" sit in a corner of the room, expressionless until their subject number is called to perform. They then deliver their lines in detached voices or passionate screams, depending on the death. "Each girl has a monologue for each death," Frugia explains, creating twenty-seven different mini-performances.

Not everyone is impressed. "I felt like I was playing a cheap computer game," one woman can be overhead saying.

Others, however, like the show enough to encourage passers-by to see it for themselves. Standing outside with their complimentary wine, guests call to a young couple walking by. "Check it out, man! It’s free!"

Death, my friend, is never free.

(2007-07-17)

Also by Nicole Briese

Open for Business
Tiffany Bullock has an MBA in finance, marketing and strategy. She also loves shoes. A lot. So much so, in fact, that she abandoned her fifteen-year-long career in finance to open her very own shoe store on Michigan Avenue
(2007-07-02)

Style
In a storefront window in the heart of Boystown, Paris Hilton stands in all her convicted glory, orange jumpsuit and handcuffs on proud display. One window over, a smoking Lindsay Lohan stands beside a post-shaving-incident Britney, while further down, a Barack Obama look-alike stands in little-boy undies, holding one end of a rainbow flag. Let the mannequins in the windows of Beatnix be your first clue: a shopping trip here isn’t for the faint of fabulous-ness
(2007-06-22)

Rowdy Rowley
Of the fifty chairs Borders has set up for the book signing of fashion legend and now author Cynthia Rowley, only half are full. An older couple sits in the second row, thumbing through her book, "Slim: A Fantasy Memoir," chuckling and making remarks like, "very true," or "very pretty!"
(2007-06-22)

Fashion Fusion
A vast array of women sporting short spiky hair, armband tattoos and dressed-up muscle tees immediately crowd the room, sandwiching themselves into the small groups of tables the club offers for seating. The smaller population of men, sporting frosted tips and unnaturally tight, dark jeans, flit to and fro around the club. The occasional female impersonator can also be seen, immediately distinguishable by their abnormally large physiques
(2007-06-15)

Landmark on the Lake
(2007-06-12)

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