Washington Street Art Center opens ‘Inappropriate Touching’

By Kimberly Geronimo

Artistic renderings of the most private of body parts and other sexual tidbits were strewn across the walls of the Washington Street Art Center on Friday as the gallery opened its newest exhibit “Inappropriate Touching.”

The exhibit attracted attention as the modest-sized room displaying the art was over-stuffed with a young, lively crowd on opening night. Cosmic punk band Real Life Time Machines was squeezed into one corner of the room and the drummer, keeping in line with the night’s theme, was clad in nothing more than a bizarre hybrid between a diaper and little white briefs.

‚ÄúInappropriate Touching‚Äù — on display until Feb. 24 — consists predominantly of comics or gags (one panel images with a line of text at the bottom) that have some sort of sexual content.

Some pieces flirt dangerously with the line dividing art and pornography, such as one series that portrays overtly sexual relations between two people on an airplane. Other pieces are more playful, such as one gag in a series of four by Johnny Ryan that depicts a man stuck in the vagina of the moon, with his friend below laughing at him, saying ‚ÄúHaw haw! The moon thinks you’re a tampon!‚Äù The artists featured in the exhibit are national as well as local.

The architect behind the unorthodoxy and sexual anarchy is Sarah Schoemann, who is also the exhibit’s curator. ‚ÄúI’ve been a big fan of a lot of these people,‚Äù she said, referring to the artists represented at the exhibit, ‚ÄúBoston is a great place for comics.‚Äù

Her inspiration for the exhibit arose primarily from a desire to create a place where the unacceptable is acceptable, she said. She described the experience of Alex Berry, one of the artists in the exhibit, who had an art show at a restaurant in Boston. Apparently, his pieces were removed after two days because they were considered inappropriate, she said. “So then I wanted to have a show where the objective was to be distasteful and rebel, and in comics you can get sort of dark and twisted,” she said.

‚ÄúI wanted to show work that didn’t necessarily have to abide by the same tastes as in other galleries in Boston,‚Äù she said.

She also thought the exhibit played to the nature of comics. ‚ÄúFor any comic artist, the direction they’re going is autobiographical,‚Äù she said. ‚ÄúI think it makes sense for an adult audience to depict their sexual lives.‚Äù

Comic artist Ariel Schrag’s sexual choose-your-own-adventure book, ‚ÄúSinful Cynthia‚Äù contains this sexually autobiographical element. According to Schrag, the plot of the book is pure fiction, but the buxom blonde protagonist is modeled after the artist’s ex-girlfriend.

Schoemann and the director of the Washington Street Art Center, Lee Kilpatrick, said finding artists to participate was not difficult. Most artists were ‚Äúpretty receptive,‚Äù said Kilpatrick, although there were a few exceptions. Some of the artists who Schoemann asked to contribute were children’s comics artists and were a little hesitant about the adult nature of the exhibit, said Schoemann. Some of those more ‚Äúwholesome‚Äù artists had considered participating under a pseudonym but in the end opted out of the exhibit altogether, according to Kilpatrick.

But half of the local artists represented at the exhibit already did sexual art independent of Schoemann’s solicitation for pieces with sexual content, said Kilpatrick.

In fact, in many cases the artists had kept the art in their back closets and stuffed into corners until this exhibit, said Schoemann.

Jeffrey Brown is one of those artists. ‚ÄúInappropriate Touching‚Äù was the first time his piece was ‚Äúout of the box,‚Äù he said. For Brown, drawing comics is a way of communicating with people, he said.  He had tried out the fine arts, but wasn’t satisfied because ‚ÄúI felt it wasn’t communicating anything to anyone in particular. With the comics I could tell silly stories that had some sort of emotional grounding,‚Äù he said.

“My work is usually more about emotion, or getting people to think about things differently,” he said.

Ryan, creator of a series of four gags, also said he finds comics to be a “natural way to communicate with people,” and he strives to make people laugh with his art.

Ryan picked the gags displayed at “Inappropriate Touching” from a comic he had made that was all X-rated gags, he said. “I decided I wanted to do a book that was all single panel dirty gags. It was just a big joke, with no grand artistic scheme,” he said.

‚ÄúI’m constantly creating inappropriate work,‚Äù he said. ‚ÄúI’m making sort of crude, off-the-wall humor. There is that excitement of being offensive.‚Äù