Work of Art Recap: Death and Finales

‘Gasmii!!  It is time.

Bravo didn’t supply pictures until the final gallery installations–sorry for the text-heavy format until then!

Just in time for your relaxing winter holiday of choice, I bring unto you the final SexyPanda recap of 2011, the final Work of Art recap of 2011, and, generally, awesomeness. Let’s go.

The show just gets it started right away. Even with home visits, a final gallery show, and crit for three artists in determination for a final prize, this show was only an hour. And it FLEW. I’ll try to keep up.

The intro is a little different, as we head right into reminder montages of the three finalists, Young, Sara, and Kymia.

Young reminds us that he was an only child growing up, and then he tells us that he’s “definitely the favorite” coming into the finale. UGH. REALLY?!  Could have fooled me, jerk. We’re reminded of the many times he’s won individual competitions with his pandering, PC “I’m a curator!” style.  So yes, he’s won challenges, but that doesn’t mean he’s a favorite or even a good artist! Before Young went home to begin work on his final gallery show, Bill Powers gave advice for Young to avoid being too PC in his show.  Young nods. He tells us that he’s leaving the PC-ness behind and “going for the gut” in his final show.

Sara J. Her reminder montage covers her strong start, her “divorse” decline during the child art challenge, and her recovery to awesomeness with the street art and Fiat 500 challenges. Before Sara J goes home to work on the pieces for her final gallery show, Jerry reminds her to spread her wings and to not be afraid of working with material.  Sara J nods.

Kymia!  We’re reminded of her sensitive nature, her social anxiety, her anxiety in general. She’s a very nervous person. We watch the many emotions of Kymia and are reminded of her successful pieces so far (the street/wall art, the child art challenge, and last week’s portrait challenge). It’s interesting to note that Kymia doesn’t get advice before heading home to work on her pieces for the finale. She’s just congratulated by China for winning a spot in the finale, and that’s that!

I do my best to overlook Kymia’s terrible grammar as they all hug goodbye before heading home to work on their junk: “I’m so excited to see your guys’s show!!” Cringe!

Young talks about Kymia’s talent, then calls Sara J a dark horse, since he has no idea what to expect from her. They don’t give us much of anyone else giving feedback about the other artists. I wonder if the editors are purposely making Young look like an egomaniacal jerk?

So now it’s two months into the three-month time frame the artists had to work. Do we know how much money they were given to create this final work? I know they say the artists were given money and three months’ time, but how MUCH money?  Later, I wonder if (then outright assume) Bravo pays for the careful shipment of all that work to NYC. I suppose Young is the only one really shipping anything, so … maybe a moot point. Why am I hung up on this?

Anyway, two months in, Simon is heading to Young’s studio in Chicago, driving a sweet little Fiat convertible. Adorable. Also adorable? How Simon pronounces the “s” at the end of Illinois. Waiting to greet Simon is Young, Young’s mother (Suzy?), and Young’s boyfriend, Mark. Simon clarifies that Mark is also an artist, which is where Young makes the comment about Mark considering him (Young) to be “a long-term investment”.  Cuz the boyfriend is a stock analyst by day. Ugh.

We get a longer look at Young’s self-portrait from the first episode, the one that he made before even showing up. It’s him, naked and dripping wet, standing in front of a tableau of his sick parents. His mom has cancer, and his dad recently lost his battle with cancer. I don’t remember seeing such a sad look on Young’s face in this piece, but now that we have a longer moment to look, it’s definitely there. Definitely sad. I mean, he lost his dad. That’s big. (And wins challenges based on street art.)

Simon sits for a spell and talks with the family. Young shows off a book he made in 3rd grade or so, where he drew a funny crayon portrait of his mom gabbing on the phone. That’s sweet.  She talks about how she wants to support him and help him. She seems like a really sweet mom. Simon is a good sport, paging through more of these books before shutting it all down. He “sanks” the family for hanging out with him, then tells Young he wants to see what he’s been working on so far.

Young’s studio is down the street or something (Bravo must’ve funded these spaces, because all three artists have off-site studios in which to work). He’s wearing more professional shorts for this Simon visit, by the way. Khaki!

Once at the studio, Young shows off his work. There’s some wooden structure that looks like a narrow chuppah or other wedding chapel-like structure. He says it’s supposed to be like the security platforms that are near the president’s house in South Korea. Okay, so what does it mean?  Who knows? Young’s more intent on taking photographs of this structure as he moves it from Chicago to NYC. Oh, he says the meaning is something about “stalking the institution I want to get into.”  Because he’ll end up at the Brooklyn Museum. I don’t love this idea. What does the Korean security platform have to do with you wanting to show at the Brooklyn museum?  And I’m jumping the gun here, but what does it have to do with anything else you’re working on for the show?

Simon is awesome, because he calls the idea boring. And unless Young injects some kind of emotion into it, it’s a total fail. Young gulps and stresses, mostly because he’s the ultimate salesman and can see that he’s lacking a lead here with Simon so far.

Simon spots a pile of men’s shirts tacked to the wall, collapsing Russian doll style.  There are other objects on the table below the shirts.  What’s this?  Oh, it’s Young’s dad’s stuff. He’s not sure what he wants to do with any of it yet, but it may make it into the show. He’s got a small scrapbook filled with personal family photos of the last months of his father’s illness. Simon finds it all incredibly moving, and he says so. Ping!! Young found his “in”–using his dead father to elicit sympathy!

Okay, I sound awful saying this, and I’m not going to articulate any ideas better than anyone already has in the mini-caps for this episode. It’s just awful that his father was so sick, that he passed away. And I can certainly understand and relate to him dealing with it through his art (been there, done that). But later, the way Young went about it was very tactical. Calculating. So, I don’t thing his art is awful for it dealing with his dad’s death. I think it’s awful that he exploited his dad’s death for a cheap win loss.

Anyway, Simon is moved by the shrine to Young’s dead father and advises Young to inject that same level of EMOTION into his work. Note that he doesn’t advise explicitly for Young to create a show about his dad’s death. He advises about that emotion.

Young says something about not being sure how to use those personal photos AND the platform in the same show. Well, yeah. I almost can’t say anything more about it. I’m beating a dead point.

Now Simon’s driving a little red Fiat to Kymia’s flat in Manhattan. She looks so happy to see Simon and just delightful in general. We meet Kymia’s boyfriend, Devon. He was a bartender and Kymia was a waitress at a Turkish restaurant down the street, that’s how they met. They’re both living with Devon’s parents right now. And now we’ll look at some of Kymia’s old family photographs. There’s her stylish Iranian mom in the 60s. Simon agrees that her mom was “a looker.”

Then there are photographs of the lake where the family used to jet-ski together…which is the same lake where her father was in a fatal jet-skiing accident. Kymia was there right after her father passed away. The way she phrased it this time and earlier in the season, I am picking up that she didn’t witness the actual accident that killed him, but she was with him in the water after he passed (or while he passed?). Either way, awful. I think she was 13 or so?  Heart-breaking.

Well, enough of that, let’s go visit the studio.

Wow, Kymia’s been doing a lot of work so far. She’s got loads of these paintings/drawings done up on transparencies. She’s done incredibly detailed line art drawings about ghosts and other images of spirituality and death. She’s also done a few sculptures so far, one of an oogedy-boogedy ghost (think white sheet with eye holes) and one of herself with giant diamonds springing from her eyes. She’s got a lot to show.

Simon’s feedback? Well, he loves some of the painting/drawing she’s done so far, but he hates the sculptures. He speaks specifically about hating the idea of owning the statue, that it disturbs him.  But Simon is a salesman, above all else. He knows art best from a sales standpoint. So he doesn’t want to sell a sculpture of Kymia with diamond-eyes, so what?  If it’s disturbing him, then maybe it’s good art!

But all Kymia hears is “I hate it.” She starts to cry a little bit. She makes sure Simon knows she appreciates the advice (and that she can handle it), but she’s still upset at the idea that maybe she has to start all over again with some of her pieces.  But it does sound like she’s on a better track so far than Young.

And yes, I’m fully aware that I have a personal bias against Young and it’s coming out in this recap quite a bit. Sorry!  Write your own recap!

Okay, now Simon’s heading out to Brooklyn to visit with Sara J. She’s so little!  Or Simon and her boyfriend Jim are so tall! Or both! Anyway, enthusiastic hugs spill forth. Sara asks if Simon wants to look around. Huh? The apartment?  He’s like, “Yeah, sure, okay.”  It doesn’t look like Sara did any cleaning at all before the camera crew came. Were they instructed–at gunpoint–not to clean or something?  I mean, I’d be shoving clutter under every bed and couch if I knew Bravo’s cameras were coming!

Anyway, she shows Simon photos of herself as a little girl, which are mostly of her holding one of her six little brothers.  Wow!  Then she and the men sit on couches and talk briefly about how she and Jim ended up together. It sounds like Jim was mostly patient while Sara approached and retreated over and over. He seems absolutely in love with her, though, brushing hair off the back of her neck while she speaks. Sweet.

Sara takes Simon for a walk down the street to her studio. Simon likes the space. Oh, there’s the mattress with a zillion hypodermic needles sticking out!  It’s a regular Saw 2 dream come true.

She further explains everything Simon sees, summarizing it as all having to do with confession and Catholicism. She wore a strange bird head (that makes her look like one of the Spy Vs. Spy guys) and walked around NYC asking for people’s confessions. (Confession: I’d NEVER allow someone to talk to me long enough to tell me to write down a confession, let alone write one down and stuff it somewhere.) So, anyway, she’s got all these confessions written out, and right now, they’re hanging from a clothesline in the middle of the studio space.

She’s also got all these watercolors with caricature-like figures of people on the street, the people who watched the confession-writing. They’re spooky, very dark and awkwardly proportioned in perfect Sara J-style. Oh, and there’s a spiderweb that she wants to glue her fingernails to (and Jim’s), and there’s some phallic sculpture that I can’t really get a good look at, to represent lust.

Simon thinks the sculptures are mostly terrible, and he doesn’t much like the cartoony paintings of the people watching the performance piece, either!  So…start over!

All three were basically told to start over!

And now it’s a month later. The artists all arrive at some hotel room or something, one by one. Kymia gets there first. She was probably super-antsy sitting at home and just HAD to rush over. Then comes Sara and the two girls hug super genuinely. Then Young spills into the room and acts like a giggly girl, hugging Sara and Kymia.

Kymia asks if Young has a crazy outfit to wear for the gallery show, and he says he doesn’t, but he does share that he’s got to get his eyebrows threaded. UGH.

Then Simon comes in, yay!  Hugs and European cheek kisses! Simon asks the artists to join him and China at the Phillips de Pury gallery tomorrow morning, and then they clink champagne glasses. Kymia’s worried that they’re going to spring one more challenge on the artists.  nah, this ain’t Top Chef!

The next day, the artists head to Simon’s gallery. I love the intimacy these contestants have with the hosts. China runs up to everyone right away to hug the shit out of them. “I’ve missed you!”  Aww!  You’d never see Tom or Padma doing that!  Speaking of China, WTF is she wearing??  That hat!  It’s shiny and hard and looks like a lid to a pot or the top and stem of a fruit! And Bravo didn’t capture a photo of it for us!

Here’s the part everyone was nervous about–Simon’s addendum. Don’t be scared, kids. It’s that Simon wants to auction off a piece of the winning artist’s work, with those proceeds going right back to the artist.  Abdi’s “Baptism,” a piece that moved me to tears last season, apparently sold for $20,000. That’s awesome. (Can I buy a print of it somewhere?  Off to Google it!) (Nope! Bravo advertised that they’re selling prints, and I’ll be damned if I can find the area of the website to do that. Anyone got any ideas?)

Sara J really should wear a bra.

And now time to hustle to set up the galleries for the final show. Everything is so carefully packaged and wrapped, I know Bravo must have paid for packing and transport. The artists cut into the plastic and tape with care, hauling everything out to see the light of day.  They have until midnight to install their shows.

Young’s show aims to “run the gauntlet of emotions.”  It’s about family, losing someone, and the full circle of life and death. All I see so far are some very personal family photos of his father dying and some clothes hanging on a line. There’s that platform thingie. What is that again, and what does it have to do with his dead father? Oh, well, if you stand on that platform, you’ll see images of Young’s mother and boyfriend. Awesome. That’s really emotional for ME. How about you?

The shrine to his dead father would probably have been more effective if it’d been the casual shrine we’d originally seen in the studio. A stacked up pile of shirts, some photographs, some tchotchkies. Instead, here’s this carefully manipulated cross with velcro shoes nailed to it, and then a canister of hard candies glued together?  I don’t know. I laugh at the moving box with all the shirts on hangers inside.  Like when you move to a new house!  But it’s an art show!

Sara’s setting up lots of stuff. She’s got a large, long box full of white paper in some sort of sculpture. She’s arranging to have a projector playing the video of her performance piece (collecting confessions). She scrapped all the paintings Simon saw a month ago in favor of new drawings and paintings that better relate to her theme. She’s still got the Saw 2 mattress and now has a painting to go along with it, a woman whose belly is flayed open much the same shape as the mattress.  She’s still got the spider web, and now she’s got a bikini made of hair. And a human body impression made of dead skin cells. I really want to know (and really do NOT want to know) how she actually constructed this. Is she that dirty, or did she roll around in dirt before pulling off dead skin cells like that?

Kymia’s setting up, too. She scrapped a lot of what she was working on when Simon first visited, and now she’s done a ton of ink drawings on paper instead of all the paintings. She some sort of headdress that relates to a drawing she did, and she’s got three graves that will be filled with natural material, to tie into the theme of death and nature.

One absolutely breath-taking piece Kymia created is a drawing of a simple sailboat filled with dirt, with the shadow of human legs on the top-most part of the sail. It’s an homage to her father, his death by boat but also the idea of boats taking spirits from life to afterlife, Viking funerals, etc. I immediately welled up when I saw it, much like I did when I saw Abdi’s “Baptism.” It’s just so meaningful and well-done and wonderful. I know right at this moment that Kymia’s going to win and Simon is going to auction this piece. It MUST go this way.

Of course there’s some drama for a few moments with Kymia’s graves and the pedestals being mis-matched in size. Sara notes Kymia’s perfectionism, admiring it because it creates such pristine work but also noting its negative effects on an artist’s well-being. She says this as we watch Kymia smooth specks of dust off her pieces.

It’s now two hours until the end of the night. Young is having trouble with getting his projectors set up exactly the way he wants. The AV tech guy almost looks annoyed, but that’s probably my personal bias. Sara is working on the finishing touches of her paper crane piece, with a zillion white origami cranes flying away in a cloud towards the sky. I love it, but I also don’t see it as being all that unique, so I’m not blown away. But I DO like it.

The crew has helped Kymia big-time by building up the existing pedestals by 6 inches. Like, built, drywalled, sanded, and painted in time for her pieces.  Thing is…if her pieces are just a white frame set up to contain a pile of material, why not have the crew rebuild the white frame for her material?  I guess maybe that meant she was changing some of her art (what are the rules?) or someone else was modifying her art?  That’s silly though, but these reality competition shows like their rules. Or could Kymia have piled up the stuff on the pedestals extra carefully to have not needed the frames at all?

Anyway.

Because Young and Sara have been buddy-buddy all along, they speak complimentarily about each others’ work. Young is “blown away” by Sara’s sculptures; she hangs on Young’s arm as he explains his dad’s shirts. Oh wait, she’s actually not thrilled with the way the shirts are displayed. I agree! Young stops by Kymia’s gallery and is gobsmacked by the level of detail in her drawings. And she did all that in one month, folks. Freehand, too, probably!

Well, it’s over. The work is set up, and it’s time for the gallery show to begin! The artists are all like, “holy shit” while they eat breakfast. I try not to roll my eyes too hard when Young talks about having done exhibitions before (but this one is a bigger deal because of the money and the solo show at the Brooklyn Museum).

So now they have an hour to do final tweaks before the gallery show begins. Workers are applying the titles/captions of each artist’s show to the walls outside the galleries. Kymia’s is “Not For Long, My Forlorn” and features a poem with that line in it.  She’s tearing up, and I am too.

Oh wait, we’re going to commercial.

And in the last “We’re Back! No, We’re Not!” segment for this season, we get to see the best of Simon. As in, Simon is actually really hip. He DJs?  He admires women’s fingernail art? He jokes about humans as chicken slaves? He does!

Okay, it really is time for the final gallery show. We’ve got our usual suspects (China, Jerry, Bill) and our guest judge for the day, Kaws. (Is he related to Tewz?   Is it, like, a thing for modern artists to have one-word names that evoke bird calls?) Kymia ‘s excited because they walked past one of Kaws’ pieces yesterday (that weird mouse-like statue with its head in its hands, as they walked to the auction house).

Let’s start the show!  Wow, everyone’s here!  Jackie, Sara’s subject from last week, is here. Yay, The Sucklord is here! He’s got a Jerry Saltz action figure to give to Jerry, as well as a glow in the dark version. “It’s sort of a thing to do in the art world to have glow in the dark versions of bald, Jewish art critics.” I LOL.

(And I get annoyed at Lola poking her head around Sucklord.) There’s Sarah K!  She looks great, the bangs suit her well!

Sara J’s show is titled “Anonymous Contemplations.”  The write-up below the title explains very succinctly the purpose of the installation. I can kinda see now why it would have been deemed as an art school level exhibition. I’m sorry. I love her and I like her stuff, but it was a little school project-like. That said, her show is very clean and direct, despite its heavy symbolism.  Oh, she has someone dressed up in the Spy vs. Spy (or is it Beetlejuice?) costume, asking for more confessions.

So why did Jerry reach in and fish one out of the nest?? Oh, Jerry, you did the performance art wrong.

I really like the piece that’s two human figures facing each other, and their rib cages are devoid of flesh so you can see the organs inside. They’re staring at each other, taking each other in, laid literally bare. I would like to have a better idea of how that was installed, what it was near. All the editing and cuts means I have no sense of how this show works as a whole.  So maybe it’s not fair that I’m calling it art school-y.

Speaking of, there’s Abdi!  Oh, I loved Abdi!  And he’s standing with Lee Quinones, talking to Richard Phillips, that really tall guest judge of the portrait challenge. Aww, Sara’s dad is as teeny as she is!

Time to check out Young’s show. Oh, there’s a portrait of Young’s boyfriend. Portrait, as in, photograph. How is that art? The title of his show, by the way, is “Bool-sa-jo,” which means “phoenix.”  (And I perk up because I have a tattoo of a phoenix!) The text below is a narrative, a dialogue between Young and his mother, about why she called him bool-sa-jo. China’s very choked up about this show, because it’s hitting home for her and her own loss of a parent. That’s great. But creating art that jerks tears of memory isn’t the same as creating art that jerks tears of meaning and communication and feeling. Again, the editing makes it hard to see the show as a whole, but I just see a lot of shirts and a lot of photographs. Young, meanwhile, is informing us that some people might find his show “inaccessible” because they’re not interested in experiencing the emotions. SHUT UP.

Oh, it looks like the canisters made of candy have to do with some colorful canisters that sit around an old Korean woman in one of the photos. Got it.

And now for Kymia’s show. “Not For Long, My Forlorn.” The text below her show title is just a poem. Simplicity is nice. Upon second viewing (and hitting pause a lot), I can see a lot of the themes that kept showing up in Kymia’s work. In the dirt grave, there are military medals. In one of the drawings, a figure is wearing the military medal on a jacket. The dirt fills up that haunting boat painting. It all goes together.

I almost can’t even describe most of Kymia’s works. It’s just fantastic enough (fantastic = of fantasy, not “really, really good”, though I certainly think it’s really good!) to evade description. The themes are of spirituality and death and how that all relates. It could be heavy-handed and art-schooly, but to me, it’s not. I could look at her stuff all day. And there’s enough detail that it would take me all day to see it all! Is that a drawing of Devon? Oh, Lola. Go away!

Can you imagine a gallery show by Lola?  It would be a hot mess. In a bad way.

Anyway, show’s over, time for crit!

Young goes first. He starts by explaining the title and theme for the show. China’s voice wobbles as she tells Young how much she relates to the piece. The guest judge compliments Young for “putting it out there.”  That’s nice. Who is this guy again, and why is he a guest judge?  Don’t you think the judging panel should include judges from challenges past?  Or at least people who articulate slightly better? This guy reminds me of a hipster adult Bart Simpson. Don’t have a cow, man.

The judges, the regular judges, compliment the work quite a bit. Bill refers to “sympathetic magic” and Jerry looks pleased. Really?  We must be missing something at home. (Though Jerry did mention that maybe Young was too obvious and didn’t leave enough mystery. Good analysis.)

Kymia’s crit is next. She explains her themes, landing on the exploration of moving from one world to the next. (I think that’s a handier way of talking about it, rather than leading with “spirituality”.)  Jerry says her work is very serious but wasn’t full of crappy psychodrama and whatnot. Bill liked the larger drawings but felt like the acetate/transparencies were studies. Kymia looks like she’s going to shit her pants, but then Jerry shakes his head to disagree. Bart Simpson says, and I quote, “When I walked into the show, I realized, like, you have all this talent.”  Um, that’s nice. And? Oh, then he compliments her drawings and textures, but says he didn’t care as much for the sculptures (the graves).

I really don’t think it’s my personal bias–I really don’t!–but when Kymia speaks of her dead father, I feel real emotion on her behalf. When Young does, I feel bad for him that his father died, but everything else otherwise rings hollow. And I don’t mean necessarily just them speaking of their dead fathers, I mean speaking of them in reference to their works of art. It’s really ephemeral, my understanding of the difference in my reactions.  Anyone care to try to articulate it?

Anyway, all this to preface Kymia’s telling of a tale of her father visiting her in a dream, of her saying in that dream that she needs to build boats, and how this dream ultimately led to her honoring her father’s visit with the drawing/painting of the boat. I really love that piece. If Bravo ever gets their shit together and sells a print of it, I’m buying it.

And finally Sara’s crit. Her show is about confessions, and most of those confessions had to do with disconnection, loneliness, addiction, lust/promiscuity. Some had to do with fear of failure, or fear of a failure to grow, failure to live up to potential. Ah, so that’s why there are a shit-ton of paper cranes flying out of a bird cage. (Someone was just throwing that cage  out on the street? Wow. I’d use it as a gigantic jewelry box!)

Jerry’s really impressed with Sara’s use of materials, which is a common theme in their interaction throughout the show. Bill felt like the show was a little disconnected, like a collection of short stories. Bart Simpson loves the dead skin cell piece, as well as the fact that she reached out into all these different media.

By the way, I just Googled Kaws and learned that he has previously done pieces about the Simpsons, subverting our usual images of them. And I called him Bart Simpson! How fucking meta! Also, he’s a toy designer, which means Sucklord either already knows him or doesn’t and was pooping his pants (good or bad) about meeting him. Fun!

And now it’s the final judges’ deliberation. To me, the winner is a clear choice, but I’m interested in what the judges really have to say. Bart thinks Kymia’s work was incredibly professional, that her command of her medium is top notch. Bill wishes she’d edited out the graves, but China and Jerry really liked them.

China loves that Sara used different materials, didn’t just do the same ink and watercolor stuff she’s been doing. Bart enjoyed the idea of strangers sharing secrets. Bill felt the show was disconnected, that a thread was missing between the sculptures and the drawings/paintings. I disagree with him except for the birdcage piece. That’s the only one that felt to me like it didn’t belong. The rest totally made sense. (okay, maybe the hair bikini and skin tape didn’t go together with stuff either.)  But Jerry really liked it all.

Young?  Jerry speaks carefully, I think because he knows China’s on thin ice with her own emotions about Young’s piece. She might rip Jerry’s throat out if he dare criticize Young’s work too hard.  Bill is sitting slightly further away, so he feels safe in saying that he dislikes the general idea of the death-bed portrait, because it’s so loaded.  Bart thought they were celebrating the life of this dead man. Really? In photos of him lying half-dead in a bed?  okay. Jerry says he thinks Young is “ready to go a long, long way.” I hope they edited the end of that sentence, which was originally “I hope Young is ready to go a long, long way off a short, short pier.” Oh man, my personal bias has got to stop. No it doesn’t!

Okay, they’re done talking about it, but we don’t really know who’s going to win.  So, let’s go to commercial and come back at the last minute to find out who won!

First, they call out Sara, just to tell her she did not win.  As in, “Bye!”  China’s a little choked up as she speaks.  I don’t know why they needed to release her only to announce the winner two seconds later. And she definitely wasn’t the 3rd place finisher. Second place, definitely. Young was the worst of the three.  And the winner?  I kinda already just gave it away by insinuation right there, but we already know anyway that it’s KYMIA!!!

I’ve had tears running down my cheeks ever since Kymia’s crit, and now their flow has sped up again. I’m SO HAPPY that she won. She totally earned it, she totally deserves it, and she’s going to be awesome in her own show at the Brooklyn Museum. (Is anyone going to go? I hope to!  The show ends Feb 5th.) And not to mention that she needs the cash. Maybe I’ll even stalk the magazine rack to buy a copy of the BlueCanvas magazine she’s featured in. Ugh, what a nerd I am.

Young and Kymia hug genuinely, and she whispers something that makes Young throw his head back in laughter. Say what I want about how annoying Young has been to me, I also appreciate this moment and his maturity and grace. He was not a sore loser, and I’m grateful.  Kymia, though.  Girl, you fucking ROCK.

The audience spills out from the other gallery, Simon first in line to hug Kymia and give her the double-Euro kiss. Then she hugs her sisters, her mom, her boyfriend.

Lola’s making sad eyes at Young. Shut up. Oh, there’s the rest of the cast! Bayete and Michelle!  Awesome! Kaws invites Kymia to visit him in Brooklyn sometime. Hugs! Kisses! Congratulations to Kymia!!!

(Now where can I buy that boat piece??!)

Thanks for taking the Work of Art journey with me a second time, everyone. I love our little community, and I’ve loved all our discussions. Thank you SO much for being here with me!! See you soon!  XOXO, SexyPanda

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