Signe Pierce is 22 years old and is currently invading your reality.

MOSSLESS: How was your experience with your mentor was Janet Borden?
SIGNE PIERCE: Janet has been great to bounce ideas off of.  She provided a lot of insight into the thought process behind the Surreal Housewives.  I think some of my subject matter was a bit foreign to her (i.e., trashy pop culture and reality television… can’t say I blame her), however she was able to help me refine some of my ideas and helped me get closer towards what it really was that I was trying to accomplish with my work. Her critiques of my images and ideas prompted me to dig into myself. She had me asking questions and verbalizing ideas I had been having a hard time putting into words. She pushed me to make sure I was digging as deep as I possibly could. I still have some things I need to figure out… I think every artist always has their questions, but I really enjoyed my conversations and time with her.

ML: Can you tell me something about your work and how you chose to frame it?
SP: The pieces in the Mentor Show, Glitz Pageant and Surreal Housewives are from a series I’ve been working on called Role Modelz.  I’ve been musing the current onslaught of girly girl nastiness and decadence in pop culture, and how we’re viewing it within the context of “reality” TV.  The whole “reality” aspect is what really fucks with me intrinsically. I guess I just get angry about what gets perpetuated and sold as being “real”, when everything seems like artifIce. I worry about the effect it has on a younger, more impressionable person. I’m very interested in the ways that the “self-as-a-subject”, “anyone can be a star” culture is going to play out, and what it’s doing to social standards. I guess by using myself in my work, and specifically by playing multiple characters I feel like I’m sort of creating a paradigm of the disturbing standards being set. I like to take things to the extreme in my images as far as pop and color and “glitz” is concerned because I tend to feel like everything that surrounds this odd culture of femininity has this sort of lazy sparkle to it that loses its luster with every hair extension that gets sold.  I think that’s what drives me the most lately is that sex appeal, beauty, femininity, body parts, whatever, is what’s being sold to me, to us.  You’re selling me make up but the girl in the ad has digital skin… you’re talking about “reality” but everything I see is fake. I wanna be like “I DON’T CARE GO AWAY!!” because I know it’s all just artificial noise, but it’s so damn loud, so I guess I have to talk back.

All of that went into how I wanted to frame them. Specifically with Glitz Pageant, I knew I wanted her (Dannica-Lynn, superstar pageant princess) to be BIG and in your face.  I liked the idea of her looking out across the room, demanding you to stare into her vapid gaze, or “dead eyes” as I refer to them.  As far as my decision to bedazzle her frame (her frame is covered with various rhinestones and gems), it just made sense for the glitzy obsession and never-ending extravagant spectacle to be interfering with the piece in a physical way.  Everything about the culture is ostentatious so of COURSE Dannica-Lynn wouldn’t be seen without gems on her frame— she’d practically be naked! The Surreal Housewives didn’t get gems because there was already so much happening inside of the picture, plus all of their dresses were bedazzled to perfection by me and my friends (thx guys!), so they were dressed with a simple purple frame.  I wanted it to be loud, slightly annoying, and in your face so that you could get lost inside the freakish, sugary, bitch glitz environment. I’m going to stop now cuz I just said bitch glitz, which renders that answer over. 

ML: What was your most memorable moment at SVA?
SP: I had Jessica Craig-Martin as my junior year critique teacher and she is someone I’ll always cherish getting to know.  She took me as an assistant on a fashion shoot for Black Book magazine at a strip club in Manhattan. Hanging out in the strippers’ dressing room was an experience I’ll never forget.  Lots of make up, tooth brushes, sparkly panties, Gandhi quotes, gaudy jewelry, wigs, suspicious looking furniture, and high-ass-heels. One of my jobs was to run out and buy emergency chicken wings and crucifixes as props.  Jessica was great because she listened to my input and was receptive to my ideas.  She’s also just really, really funny.  When we would talk about our work and the ugly overconsumption of culture and material things and the sort of nausea it leaves one with she summed the mantra up perfectly with a sarcastic, “Give me bloated excess; give me diamonds!”.  I consider that to be a sort of philosophy of my characters for this series.

ML: What are you going to be doing in your upcoming years? 
SP: I’m definitely focusing on the humorous aspect that my work tends to have.  I feel like there’s nothing that speaks to me louder than good humor, and I like the idea of using it as a device to deliver information and headier ideas.  I’ve been exploring performance in my work for the past couple of years by playing these characters in my images and I’m starting to grow restless with the still photograph. I think the natural progression for me is taking the characters out of their silent still images and into actual reality.  I’ve spent so much time over-obsessing and dissecting the nature of “reality” and what it is to be real, and I think in order to really get what I want out of this I need to have my girls (and boys!) go into the real world.  I want to give them a voice and have them interact with real people and see what effect it can have. I am inspired to test the limits of subject matter, comfort levels, genre and humor. That’s what’s motivating me currently.  I’ll be doing something involving this at the Mentor Show, which you can watch here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/itz-bryssa-betch

(these questions were all asked just before the opening night. Hit ustream the link just above to see the performance Signe put on— I just had to ask an extra question about it)

ML: Can we talk about your performance at the show? I was the first person you ran into [in the video you can see me in the elevator] and even though I knew it was you I couldn’t recognize you, I wasn’t sure what to do.
SP: The performance was something I had been toying with for a while.  I knew I wanted to place my characters in an interactive setting, and having one debut at the mentor show just seemed like a challenge that made sense.  I knew that for this series the main representative would have to be a fame-hungry reality star, and thus, Bryssa was born.  Bryssa was basically a combination of every reality TV product I’ve ever observed— blonde, tan, extremely obnoxious.  However what sets her apart is that she films herself via her “reality stick”.  Basically I just attached my phone to a pink plastic pole and live streamed it to the internet to her show, “Itz Bryssa, Betch” so that everything she was doing could be viewed in real time.  She was walking around filming herself and making a spectacle of everything she was doing, which was essentially nothing.  She was there to represent Signe because “Sig couldn’t be there” and she just wanted to come out and support the arts for a night (the fact that she was featured in Surreal Housewives had NOTHING to do with it…) 

After a while she started to feel nauseous from all of the attention that was being payed to her and was downing slimey cocktails.  This led to her getting sick and puking all over Signe’s exhibit area.  By the end of it she had slipped in her own puke, lost her shoes, broken her cocktail glass, and somehow managed to cover the flowers Janet Borden gave her in slime.  She put the flowers below Dannica-Lynn’s picture as “a symbol of something.” (her words, not mine). I’m looking forward to editing the footage we filmed and turning it into a show.  This is just the beginning for Bryssa, she has so many exciting adventures to embark on with her Reality Stick (Bryssa Goes Clubbin’, Bryssa Goes To the Manhattan Mall on a Saturday, etc).  As far as reactions are concerned, you weren’t alone in not knowing what to do.  I think a lot of people didn’t know what to do with Bryssa other than to gawk, which was exactly the point.  She is there for you to consume and to be afraid of. You should be afraid!