Postcrypt turns up the heat with one-night ‘Scarlet Fever’ show

Seeing red took on several new meanings at Postcrypt Art Gallery’s first exhibit of the semester, “Scarlet Fever: The Red Show.” The event, co-curated by Rachel Valinsky, CC ’12 and Spectator deputy photo editor, and Sarah Lipman, BC ’11 and visuals editor for The Eye, was held in the basement of St. Paul’s Chapel on Friday night.

“We wanted to have a Red Show … exploring the connotations of the color red,” Valinsky said. The artists, all of whom were Columbia students, conveyed this concept through a range of mediums, from a photograph of a mermaid with a red filter, titled “Dreaming of Agent Cooper” by Atira Main, GS, to a T-shirt screen print titled “Cheer the Great Victory of the Korean People’s Army’s Triumphant Troops” by Simon Herzog, CC ’12.

But the show was about more than the works themselves. “We wanted to create a red environment,” Valinsky said.

For Lipman, that meant making use of the multi-sensory element of the color. The show was about “not just being red like the color,” she said, “but what red makes you feel, what you think about when you see red.”

To create the red environment, red drinks and snacks were served under red paper lanterns. While Twizzlers, strawberries, and Kit Kat bars were quickly eaten up, an unconventional bowl of red bell peppers and cherry tomatoes remained mostly untouched, as if a work of art itself. Guests added to the red atmosphere by incorporating the color into their outfits, from red nail polish to full-on red cocktail dresses.

The Facebook event page—the main means of publicity for the show—promised guests an interactive experience. “Red in and of itself is kind of an interactive color because it’s so intense that when you look at it you kind of have an emotional reaction… but we have video, we have the food, everything is supposed to be a part of the show,” Valinsky said.

Indeed, several elements of the show were interactive. Of the 20 or so works on display, a life-size sketch of Oscar Wilde’s tombstone accompanied by red lipsticks and pens encouraged guests to smooch the drawing. Also drawing audience participation was a formal dinner table complete with a red sateen table cloth, roses, and place tags for Scarlett Johansson, George W. Bush, Little Red Riding Hood, and Mao Zedong—“a last supper thing,” according to Lipman, who put the piece together. Guests took bites out of the red apples on each plate—a gesture that Lipman had hoped for, but not planned.

The event, which was a one-night production, had been postponed a week due to bad weather. “We were kind of ready for it last week and it was kind of annoying to have to mentally prepare ourselves for it again,” Valinsky said.

A lot of work went into the show, but the extra week allowed more time to find artists. “We reached out in pretty much every direction. We talked to them [artists], like how would you express red, how would you show that feeling, that color,” Lipman said.

Some last-minute additions included Samuel Draxler, CC ’12, who juxtaposed photographs of bloody animal carcasses with photographs of his friend in a red onesie, all of which were pulled from his personal collection.

Other artists made their works specifically for the event. Charles Fletcher, GS, described “Crush,” his dreamlike oil painting of a girl in lingerie whose face is covered by a medical mask, as “heavy narrative … about a lot of things going on like globalization.”

The show, Fletcher’s first at Columbia, gave him the chance to express his feelings about red. “Red is passion, anger, and impulsiveness, all the good things in life, all the extremes… red is honesty.”

The way Fletcher summed up his work seemed to drive home the message of the entire show—he said it was “pretty much a unification of things we cannot understand.”