Michele O'Marah and Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer join Now Instant for a special presentation of O'Marah's 2012 Blow Me!, followed by a conversation between the two.

Blow Me! is a 40-minute video artwork which focuses on the British fashion legend Isabella Blow.  Blow was a notorious eccentric from a down-on-their-luck aristocratic family.  She worked as a fashion editor and had a very outlandish personal style.  She was most known for wearing lavish hats and was the muse of Phillip Tracy, the famous milliner, whom she is credited with discovering along with the fashion designer Alexander McQueen.  Blow lived a lavish lifestyle spending massive sums of money on a fantastical wardrobe and restoring her husbands dilapidated British manor.  While witty and satirical, she was a hopeless romantic who believed fantasy and beauty should be ever present in daily life.  Ultimately, she was disappointed and spiraled into a depression that led to several dramatic suicide attempts, she finally succeeded by drinking weed killer while wearing a silver lame gown. 

Blow Me! is very lo-fi as it was made all in the artists’ studio with a crew of one or two people.  The work is experimental in nature and loosely tells the story of its central character over a series of vignettes.  The props and sets are clearly handmade, and the acting is mostly amateurish.  This is largely in keeping with the artist’s other work which often remakes existing media as an attempted exploration on how narratives are constructed within the larger culture.  This work also continues the artist interest in issues as portrayed in the media as “women’s issues” such as romantic love, body ideals and beauty standards, female ambition, motherhood and child rearing among them. Blow Me! was originally commissioned by the Hammer Museum for Made in LA, 2012.

Michele O’Marah is a multimedia artist whose practice is anchored in the exploration of pop culture. She received a B.F.A. in photography in 1991, at a time when appropriation was central to the work of artists such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince—an influence that continues to shape her approach, alongside the DIY indie and punk aesthetics of the early 1990s. Drawing on familiar clichés and tropes from mass media, O’Marah’s work engages the socio-political subtexts that underlie popular forms.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in London, Berlin, Oslo, Vancouver, and Mexico City, and is held in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is an art writer and curator based in Los Angeles, where she teaches at Otis College of Art and Design, publishes Pep Talk, and runs the experimental art venue The Finley Gallery. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Artforum, ArtReview, Art in America, Artonpaper, ArtSlant, Mousse, and exhibition catalogs.

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