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WHO ARE YOU?
The human mop
BY CAMILLE DODERO
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This past Monday, South Boston resident Andrew Mowbray scrubbed the floor with his hair. Wearing a three-piece thermoplastic suit in the sweltering heat, the Duxbury native intermittently dunked his fresh buzz cut into a murky paint tray of Just for Men® hair dye, and scoured away for nearly 40 minutes. "There was one point, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m going to throw up,’" said Mowbray the next day. (He didn’t.) But after crawling around on the Mills Gallery floor for so long, his knees were bruised, his neck was sore, and his hair looked like a beauty-school accident. "I seem okay, except for this unusually weird color on my head." The Sunday before his stunt, the 33-year-old sculptor/painter sat in his studio in the Distillery, an artists’ live/work space nestled in Southie. Dressed in khaki shorts, blue-plastic flip-flops, and a plaid short-sleeved shirt, Mowbray explained that he was recreating Loving Care, Janine Antoni’s 1994 piece in which the Bahamas-born artist mopped an entire gallery floor with her long, flowing locks. While Antoni’s performance was a statement about female empowerment, specifically challenging women’s traditional roles as indentured housekeepers, Mowbray wanted Just for Men to reflect masculinity’s shifting contemporary responsibilities and explore the perceived ineptitude of men in domestic roles. "[Antoni] had long hair, so she had broad sweeping motions. This is more of a pathetic stamping motion," said Mowbray, referring to what he accomplished with his close-cropped fuzz. A Massachusetts Cultural Council grant recipient for 2005 who studied sculpture at the Maryland Institute of Art and Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art, Mowbray’s installations, sculptures, and paintings have frequently toyed with masculinity, often through the framework of his favorite hobby, fishing. (He’s employed as a part-time sculptural assistant at Wellesley College, but swears masculinity was a recurring theme long before he got the job.) In the past few years, Mowbray has been videotaped fishing in a white suit at Walden Pond. He’s created fishing lures modeled after Constantin Brancusi’s famous sculpture Bird in Space and sold them for $9.95. He’s fabricated fishing flies out of his own hair. Although he takes his work seriously, Mowbray is keenly aware that his creations, and their presentations, are absurd. "The whole idea of making art for me is strange. I still kind of feel like, what is this weird stuff I’m making?" Sometimes, someone else is making it. For example, there’s another name fastened to the door of Mowbray’s studio: Tsunami Jones. As Mowbray sits near a tackle box, amid fishing rods and a thick roll of Tyvek plastic, he hands over a color snapshot of a cocktail-clutching swinger-type in dark sunglasses and a white suit. "This is Tsunami," he said, explaining that Tsunami is the Osaka-born son of a United States government topographer and a geologist. Then Mowbray hands over another photo: a painter named Huck Stoddard, a fisherman posed with crossed arms and wearing a knit cap, cable-knit sweater, and jeans, whom Mowbray describes as "real New England." Turns out, they’re Mowbray’s brush-wielding personas, characters who both debuted in a 2004 group fishing-themed show at the Lillian Imming Gallery at Emmanuel College. Like Mowbray, Jones and Stoddard have their own résumés, painting styles, and fanbases. (Not surprisingly, Newbury Street galleries like Tsunami Jones’s best.) "[Tsunami’s] actually going to go away for a bit — after this past year, tsunamis just weren’t cool anymore." But Mowbray’s alter egos just confuse some folks. "People who figure it out are like, ‘Oh, you must be schizophrenic.’ It’s kind of like, ‘Well, are you saying that all fiction writers are schizophrenic?’" Andrew Mowbray’s Just for Men will be at the Mills Gallery project space, at 539 Tremont Street in the South End, from June 17 through July 31, with an opening reception Friday, June 17 from 6 to 8 p.m. Call (617) 426-8835.
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