Naoe Suzuki and Dramahound Productions: Mi Tigre, My Lover

Open Source Gallery
306 17th Street, Brooklyn, New York
June 25th- July 9th

Opening Reception: June 25th, 7:00-10:00pm
Play by Dramahound Productions: June 25th, 7:30pm and 8:30pm



Mi Tigre, My Lover, detail
Mineral pigment and graphite on paper.

How exciting! Anne Phelan of Dramahound Productions wrote a short play which was inspired by my series, Mi Tigre, My Lover. And we’re showing our works together at the Open Source Gallery in New York later this month.

My series, Mi Tigre, My Lover is inspired by a life of Mabel Stark, a renowned female tiger trainer in the early 1900s when the circus was in its golden age. Her relationships with tigers and men were complex. Mabel survived many severe mauling by her tigers and had five husbands, but she seemed to have always preferred tigers.

Just a brief background on Mabel’s life. Mabel Stark was a nurse for a short time before she joined the circus as a sideshow dancer in 1909. She married a rich man in Texas, but only a few months later she left to join the Cosmopolitan Amusement Company as a cooch dancer. The following year or so, she was performing cat act with two tigers and a pair of lions for the Al G. Barnes Circus. By the early twenties, her wrestling tiger act became the best-known cat act in the American Circus. Mabel also raised a tiger from a cub—her favorite tiger, Rajah. She bottle-fed him and let him sleep in bed with her. She was mauled several times throughout her career, but kept coming back to the tiger cage every time. Mabel committed suicide on April 21, 1968. According to the show-business newspaper, it was a heart attack and her age was listed as seventy-nine. She always lied about her age and her exact age was actually unknown.

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, detail
Mineral pigment and graphite on paper.

Mi Tigre, My Lover at the Open Source Gallery will be a multi-media installation, originated out of my series, and the related play by Anne Phelan of Dramahound Productions. Just a brief correspondence with Anne revealed that she too had pretty intense relationship with Mabel and Rajah when she was working on her play. She said, “I feel like Mabel and Rajah have taken up semi-permanent residence in my head.”  That’s exactly how I felt when I was working on these drawings. I had several images of Mabel from books and internet, as well as many images of tigers on my wall. I kept looking at these images for more than a year before I actually started drawing about them. By then I was very consumed by Mabel and Rajah. During my research on Mabel, I also came across a great book called, “The Final Confession of Mabel Stark,” by Robert Hough, a fictional biography based on Mabel Stark’s life. Hough’s novel provided another interesting layer to the life of this famous female cat tamer.

For me, it was the ‘love affairs’ aspect of Mabel’s relationships with her tigers that fascinated me, as well as her wild career and private life. In Mi Tigre, My Lover, there’s a complex play of love/power relationship between a woman and her tiger. Obsession, control, submission, passion, tension and love filled the space between them.

Dramahound Productions will be performing a play entitled My Tiger, My Lover written by Anne Phelan during the opening reception on June 25th. The cast includes Cotton Wright as Mabel Stark and Jacob Grigolia- Rosenbaum as Rajah the tiger, both featured in last year’s “Deconstruction.” It will be directed by Tamara Fisch, with costumes by Sidney Shannon. I’m really looking forward to seeing this play!

View the entire series of Mi Tigre, My Lover.

Read Dramahound blog.

Experiment Diary/Drawings: 2

Here are more drawings from Experiment Diary/Drawings series. I was interested in using scientific experiment to show dynamics in relationships; power, emotions, balance/imbalance, and connection/disconnection. Interestingly enough, there are a lot of leakages, machines/equipments-breaking, and toxic chemicals. Now I see why—this was one of my first series after taking a year off from making art during my divorce process. Breakage, water spilling, mending, staining, working, working, working, more spilling, and creating.

8.10.00 Long Trail, VT (dripping sweat on yellow chair)

8.10.00: Unknown location (two yellow chairs, water from the mountains)

8.22.00: San Sebastian, Spain (siesta hours)

9.4.00: Monday, above some land

9.10.00: Madrid, Spain (acting like a 5 years old)

10.15.00: Ashburnham State Forest (dripping yellow chair)

Untitled (wilted plant and poison)

Experiment Diary/DrawingsPen and mineral pigment on mat board or paper
5"x 4" or 4"x 3 ½”
2000

Experiment Diary/Drawings: 1

I’ve been going through a lot of old drawings and sketches in the past year. It started when I had a flood in my basement last March and lost a lot of old drawings. I’ve began to scan some of them to organize these little drawings better. It’s been interesting to revisit these random drawings. This series of drawings is from 2000. I used to carry a small cardboard case that could fit 4”x6” papers, and I carried it with pen and papers inside everywhere I went. I was always drawing whenever I had a chance. On the back of the paper, I often recorded the location, date, and the number of steps, calories and miles from a pocket pedometer that was attached to my body. I usually wrote some poem or texts as well.  I must have been obsessed with record keeping at that time. Not only I kept those records and included on the backside of each drawing, I remember that I also recorded everything I consumed for a day in my journal.  With those texts and records on the back, these little drawings are like diary, and seeing them again after ten years, it is interesting to see how I still use some of the same images as recurring vocabularies in my current work.

These are some of the drawings from the series, Experiment Diary/Drawings.



7.15.00. East Gloucester, MA




7.15.00. Unknown Location




7.16.00. Harvard Sq. Cambridge, MA




7.23.00. Ipswitch, MA - River Wildlife Sancturary (same result)




7.23.00. Ipswitch, MA - River Wildlife Sancturary 2




7.23.00. Newburyport, MA (yellow chair watching the blue screen on TV)




Back of 7.23.00. Ipswitch, MA - River Wildlife Sancturary 2




Back of 7.23.00. Ipswitch, MA - River Wildlife Sancturary




Back of 7.23.00. Newburyport, MA



Experiment Diary/Drawings

Pen and mineral pigment on mat board

5"x 4" each, 2000

Altered book pages

I love working on old book pages. This practice goes back to 1998. Dear John was comprised of a total of 152 pages from a book called Stories by Elizabeth Bowen, published in 1959. Each page was painted in watercolor, leaving selected words and sentences visible. As its title suggests, this work reflected my emotions and feelings at that time in my life, and I treated it almost like my personal diary. This practice is something that I keep going back time to time.

In 2008 when I was between jobs, I picked up a book called A White Hand: A Story of Noblesse Oblige by Ella Farman (1875), and this time, unlike the other work, Dear John, I just had fun. I sold many of them, and I didn't document nearly a half from this book. I don't even know how many pages I actually completed. These are just several pages that I was able to scan.

She patiently waits

I am the sinner

Thanks for this great care

His protracted absence



And still he cannot understand



Small hands clinging so tightly

Altered book page series from A White Hand: A Story of Noblesse Oblige by Ella Farman

Mineral pigment on book page

4 ½”x 7”.  2008