sideshow — Deborah Ayerst artists' agent

sideshow is a personal project of mine that started out in the bricks & mortar space & has now morphed here in to the digital space. The concept behind sideshow is that I have met & continue to meet many amazing individuals at their day jobs in our business of advertising & design, only to discover in getting to know them, that they have amazing creative interests they pursue on the side that are well worth bringing to light. At first, whether it was the receptionist at a clothing company or an Executive CD at an ad agency, I wanted to give these individuals a space to show their personal photography work. Now, the mandate of sideshow is to give that receptionist or that ECD a place to showcase their art, no matter what the form it takes.

Long ago, I started out on the fine art side of art, well before I became an agent for advertising, working at a gallery in Los Angeles that brilliantly ran shows of contemporary painting, art films, video art, poetry readings (how I got to meet Bukowski!), conceptual & performance work & beyond. It was a stimulating and freely open format and the curator I worked under was a true Beat spirit from New York. Andy Warhol will always be one of my heroes & I believe that my own interest in curating the important, the funny, the pop, the beautiful or the disruptive is going to be well served by sideshow.

featured artist: Peter Frederiksen
day job: Art Buyer / AbelsonTaylor
sideshow: Visual Artist / Painting

artist statement: There is an accepted variety inherent in cartoons that allows for a number of styles of image that, paired with thematic storytelling, is diverse in a way that only some fully realized art is capable of being. Cartoons can be silly, fun, violent, repulsive, and gorgeous, often all in a single image.

I like to employ cartoon imagery when representing the banality of living my life as a 25-year-old semi-professional, glorifying something as simple as a spill on a coffee table with hard outlines and larger-than-life colors and titles, all in a style that owes itself to years of watching Looney Toons with my father. My themes and concepts are rooted in some sense of bachelor domesticity meeting your run-of-the-mill fears of inadequacy and existential concerns, blurred by cartoonish abstractions, thick and clumsy lines accenting forms reminiscent of Sunday mornings in front of the television.

links: http://pefrederiksen.tumblr.com/
purchase: All original pieces in the sideshow gallery are exclusively found here & are available for purchase.
Price list available upon request to deb@debayerst.com.