“I don’t like to do things half-assed. Like if I get fucked up, I want my heart to stop and be like this close to dying and come back and be like, Alright, I’m all set.”Miguel Mickey Michael Matos Gambona (a.k.a. AIDSBOT), Window DresserTaking a cab to a private gallery exhibiting someone like Paul McCarthy’s perverted mannequins kinda takes away from the intrinsic shock of witnessing Santa dumping a shit atop a conveyor belt of candy. You kinda knew it was coming, that’s why you went.Conversely, walking down Broadway and seeing a pimped out-Darth Vader receiving lightsaber fellatio atop a Chewbacca rug is just plain what-the-fuck.“I think I’m like the only straight window dresser ever made,” Matos confesses. “Everyone’s a DJ, everyone’s a photographer, and nobody’s trying to push the medium of windows. By working in such a restrictive medium, it kind of pushes me to make my ideas that much more solid, but it sucks because you don’t get girls doing windows.” Aside from receiving only a couple of death threats, complaints from Corky (Life Goes On), and the attention of 14-year-old Marilyn Manson girls, being top man in a gay profession isn’t offering Matos much.Using the medium of the storefront, he exposes the billion-plus people that walk past the busiest section of Broadway to “the horrors of life, but in a ha-ha funny kind of way.” Faith healings, stabbings, Louima, botched kidnapping plots, and sometimes a butchered Easter bunny are the macabre and cynical images shot at the public with the verve of a bell-tower sniper. “Just get inside people’s heads, that’s all I’m trying to do.”As Matos went into a rant comparing his work to how graffiti operates in a viral sense by replicating and mentally hijacking people who see it, I noticed a rather fruity scent in the air. Matos explains it’s his cucumber/melon moisturizer topped off with a mix of kiwi and plum body spray. “I just want to smell like a girl,” he says defensively. “Everyone thinks I’m gay because I guess I’m really effeminate, but it’s just because I really hate men. I don’t know what it is about me, either. I had a really bad stepdad or something. I’m just obsessed with women in general, just their shape and structure. They embrace the whole aspect of a curve, and a curve is so pure. The mathematics behind curves is so beautiful on its own, but I’ve never had a double-D chick so I haven’t truly experienced it. That’s why I’m trying so hard to be an art superstar. It’s all I got.”
Photo Captions:1st Row: From left to right: murdered Easter bunny, Christmas break-in, disposing of the body.2nd Row: From left to right: dog funeral, dog funeral close-up, mummified family.3rd Row: From left to right: ER catastrophes, white trash bunnies, knifing a cop.4th Row: From left to right: shitty party, Santa hold-up, gimps.
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Photo Captions:1st Row: From left to right: murdered Easter bunny, Christmas break-in, disposing of the body.2nd Row: From left to right: dog funeral, dog funeral close-up, mummified family.3rd Row: From left to right: ER catastrophes, white trash bunnies, knifing a cop.4th Row: From left to right: shitty party, Santa hold-up, gimps.