When the biggest snowstorm in five years fell on Ridgewood last week, it took the alt-burlesque performer Mimi Silk three hours to make her snowman. Like everywhere else in New York, the sidewalks in Queens were quickly filled, first with intransversible piles of snow and then with more local inventions. Caves were dug out of the walls of plowed snow and forts built and defended in nearby playgrounds. But everywhere you could look, snowmen were being quietly sculpted and appearing magically, their carrot noses and button eyes announcing that winter, only two months too late, had finally arrived.
The most vivid of these, perhaps, could be found on Catalpa Avenue, an unimposing street of rowhouses that abuts Myrtle Avenue. On such a street Ms. Silk’s snowman was striking and continuously stopped passerby in their tracks. It was an entirely different animal: a snowcat, in fact, brightly colored with protruding whiskers made of felt. She had crafted eyes that were large and mysterious, their frozen expression of expectation not unfamiliar to any student of residential feline behavior.
“I see art as this kind of very visual representation of our thought process,” Stephanie McGovern told me. But McGovern, who in the pre-pandemic era performed as “Mimi Silk” at spots like the Footlight and House of Yes, also admitted other motivations: “I didn’t want to stay in my house all day.”
A Bay Area-native who had drifted to New York, McGovern is now pursuing a graduate degree at SVA. Two years ago, she had performed for the first time at an amateur burlesque night and had discovered a medium she describes as “burlesque with a sort of twisted edge to it. Nothing, I’d say, that’s traditional.”
It had moved her greatly to create something and then watch people react to it in front of her.
“The moment I did it, I was like, this is what I was meant to do. It was such a visceral feeling,” she says.
McGovern sees a connection between the deliberately ephemeral work she performed on the stage and her more recent and careful creation of snow, ice and color. The work’s value as a local pop art artifact could be evidenced merely by watching it; since building it, she’s been clocking the reactions from the COVID-safe perch of her apartment window.
There were kids, joyously shocked by its sudden and colorful appearance; adults who whipped their phones out and texted it to their friends. Two gruff locals paused in front of it and compared it to Hillary Clinton before moving along. “That’s what art does,” McGovern muses.
McGovern came to Ridgewood for the arts scene, which before the pandemic, she says, had been among the most quietly vibrant in the city, anchored both by its proximity to Manhattan by train and the neighboring club and galleries in Bushwick. Before she turned to performance, McGovern worked primarily in textiles, an interest that brings her around often to the Supermoon art space , a daytime daycare on Onderdonk avenue that doubles into an alternative gallery with a focus on highlighting the neighborhood’s rich knitting history. (According to one count appearing in the Queens Chronicle, knitting mills in Ridgewood once produced three out of every four sweaters worn in the country.)
These days, her work as “Mimi Silk” has been largely confined to her Vimeo page, where it similarly evades easy characteristization. In one piece, a performance called “Hard Tommy,” Silk initially appears in an oversize suit, finger gunning behind a Nicolas Cage facemask, and struts confidently to the Rod Stewart disco hit “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” The choreographic feat that evokes nothing less than Christopher Walken in “Weapon of Choice,” before the track changes to the Cardi B single “Money,” a connection that makes a certain kind of sense. Online, she says she’s building a visual language to catalog her performance work in a way that wouldn’t have been possible on stage at the House of Yes, where she can now zoom in and edit herself in the comfort of her own home. Lately, some of her work involved slime and more tactile materials, which makes these pieces feel sensuous and playful. And, yes, she has fielded comparisons to Marilyn Minter, the celebrated Manhattan painter who had a show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2017.
“But I’ve always kind of made things like that. I’m very interested in hands and closeups of the face,” she says.
When she turned her attention to building a snowcat on Catalpa Avenue, the brash colors would certainly not look out of place on one of Minter’s later glitter-studded canvases. But McGovern’s ambitions were more modest. “A lot of it was trying to make sure it didn’t look phallic or weird,” she said.
The open-ended approach is not unlike most performance work, a legacy that stretches from the last century of Duchamp-style surrealism to the alternative burlesque stage.
Maybe it’s only me who sees the snowcat as a radical confrontation with the limits of the body, its bizarre shapeliness suggesting a world beyond the limitations of the real. (It makes “no anatomical sense,” she admits.) And then it will go away and exist only in the memories of thrilled passerby.
But that’s also the point, and maybe McGovern agrees.
“Anything can become art when you’re putting it on a stage. Like, I cut my hair on a stage, like a year ago, and that was a big art piece,” she reminisces. “How do we keep making art when we’re not allowed to be around people? Do we stop? Some of us can’t.”
Cover photo credit: Andrew Karpan
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