Blondey McCoy is a skater, fashion designer and artist and he is only 21. Sigh.
For his latest artistic endeavour the mulit-hyphenate has teamed up with celebrated photographer Alasdair McLellan for a Los Angeles art exhibition opening today.
McLellan photographed Mccoy at the city’s iconic Griffith Park Observatory, standing in front of a sculpture of what looks like a crucified corpse. The spectacle in the background is, in fact, an uncannily lifelike sculpture, made by McCoy, of a crucified John ‘Plato’ Crawford, who was shot in the 1955 film Rebel without a Cause.
“The Loved One”, is made from silicone and real human hair, and balanced on an eleven foot iron crucifix, which McCoy and McLellan were forced to drag down a steep hiking trail in a bag to instal at Mount Hollywood. “The air was filled with hiker’s shrieks,” writes McCoy in an Instagram post of the sculpture.
The idea behind the photographs was to explore the importance of iconography in our society. McCoy says he is inspired by the notion that heroes of pop-culture can live on in the minds of future generations citing Elvis, Princess Diana and Morrissey as real-life examples.
“In creating this real-life memorial to a fictional character, I wanted to play on the idea of personal Jesus’s and the worship of false idols,” he wrote on Instagram.
“I think our heroes - be they somewhat romanticised, heavily filtered, or even completely fictional – provide us with a sense of hope that is absolutely necessary to life and society. Without hope, there is nothing.”
The crucifix will not be displayed in the exhibition but McLellan’s photographs will be on show alongside two of McCoy’s other works Scandal and Face to Face.
The Loved One by Blondey McCoy is at 2270 Venice Boulevard, Los Angeles, from May 10 – 13, 2019.
