SHELLY MARS

Shelly Mars is a New York–based performance artist, printmaker, textile artist, and writer whose work has moved through character, gender, sexuality, the body, clothing, and transformation for more than four decades.

She grew up in Celina, Ohio, inside her grandparents’ clothing store, Goldstein’s. As a child she played in the display windows, pretended to be a mannequin, invented characters, and watched how people moved and talked. The store was part playground, part theater, part family institution. Clothing, performance, observation, and transformation were intertwined before she had words for any of them.

Mars left Ohio for California, finding her way through experimental theater, yoga, the San Francisco underground, and the queer and S&M communities of the late 1970s and 1980s. By the time she arrived in New York, she had begun developing the elaborate personae that became central to her work.

Her characters are not simply impersonations. Mars uses them to metabolize what she observes and experiences—to push aspects of sexuality, power, gender, hypocrisy, desire, cruelty, and vulnerability beyond ordinary social limits. They have included Martin, an over-sexed and extravagantly misogynistic man; the cold alcoholic Susan Powell; the narcissistic actress Shirley Remington; and Dr. Ghislaine Pussait, a globe-trotting primatologist who uses bonobo sexuality to examine human behavior.

Mars describes her process as a form of mediumship. Decades of performance, Iyengar yoga, martial arts, Zen practice, bodywork, psychoanalysis, and other forms of physical and psychological investigation have taught her to enter a receptive state in which gestures, voices, images, impulses, and whole personalities can emerge.

That is true onstage and off. Characters collide. Memories interrupt the present. Comedy can turn suddenly into violence, confession, obscenity, or grief. The same process now runs through her printmaking and textile work.

Mars began screen printing in 2010, eventually bringing archival photographs, fragments of her performance history, primitive drawings, text, collage, and hand-pulled imagery onto paper and clothing. She is especially drawn to old American T-shirts whose surfaces already carry decades of wear. A bad registration, ghost image, drip, hole, or stray mark can become the thing that makes a piece alive.

For Mars, printing clothing also closes a circle that began at Goldstein’s. The garment is not simply a surface for an image. It has a body, a history, a cut, a weight and a previous life. Once worn, the work moves back into the world on another body and continues changing.

Her current practice brings these histories together: performance, autobiography, archival imagery, printmaking, vintage garments, writing, and the accumulated physical knowledge of a lifetime.

The impulse has remained remarkably consistent: to listen closely, transform what she finds, and give form to the things people usually try not to say.

Mars is currently at work on a memoir that moves through her childhood in Ohio, the underground worlds of San Francisco and New York, sex, performance, family, the AIDS crisis, and more than four decades of making art and creating characters. Like the rest of her practice, the book is built through memory, collage, archival material, and the collision between lived experience and performance.