ARTS . Art

Pictures of You

With a pen in hand, Flash Rosenberg makes sense of the universe.


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Published: Aug 25, 2010

Courtesy of Flash Rosenberg

GRIN AND BARE IT: Flash Rosenberg's brand of humor involves cartoons, Venn diagrams and sometimes showing a little skin.

[ performance art ]

Flash Rosenberg's got her sights on Philadelphia, the wellspring of her avant-garde "sketchy" brand of humor — and the town where she first stood on stage wearing nothing but camouflage underpants and a body full of Sharpie ink. (More on that later.) Rosenberg garnered Philly acclaim back in the early '90s for her XPN Morning Show shorts, "Flash Moments." Nowadays her "conversation portraits" — animations drawn while someone's talking — exemplify her free-associative shtick. Less of a comedy act, her upcoming show at the PSALM Salon, "Laughing at the Speed of Light," will be a multimedia joyride through our everyday optical existence.

City Paper: How would you explain your show to someone who knows nothing about you?

Flash Rosenberg: My work is about how you translate something into another language. Not French or Spanish, but how you make what you feel into a drawing, and how that differs from how it becomes a photograph or how it becomes words or spoken text. I very much like playing with all these elements and seeing how they become quite funny when translated into another form.

CP: You spent a lot of time in Philly. Favorite memories here?

FR: [WXPN] asked me to come to the North Star Bar, which was holding a performance series. I thought to myself, "I'm not going to stand there and talk. I should do something!" Since I'm a visual artist, I created visuals that would illustrate some of the material from the radio. But then, I needed captions for my photos. So I decided to memorize it all. Well, it takes a long time to memorize an hour's worth of stuff. So when it came time to do the show, all I knew was the first sentence and I thought, "Ooooh, crap!" I took a Sharpie and started making notes about the script on my wrist and ended up writing all over my body with a Sharpie, the whole entire piece. ... I went to the performance and when I got there I said, "Let me just take out my notes." I unzip my jumpsuit and I'm there in my camo underwear with Sharpie written all over me.

CP: What's "optical humor"?

FR: I recently finished a conversation portrait on George Carlin. There's a wonderful bit he does, which I illustrated, in which he asks, "Why is prostitution illegal? Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal?" Now, that's not a rude joke; it's actually an equation or a Venn diagram. A lot of jokes happen where things are overlapping and there's logic, but of course it's not logical. So I get to play in my brain like a scientist, but I get to express it as an artist, someone who is free from having to prove it.

(will.stone@citypaper.net)

"Laughing at the Speed of Light," Sat., Aug. 28, 8 p.m., $16-$20, The PSALM Salon, 5841 Overbrook Ave., 215-477-7578, psalmsalon.com.