vice new photo: This DIY Artist Transforms into Haunted House Icons in This Hilarious Series

Friday, June 21, 2019

This DIY Artist Transforms into Haunted House Icons in This Hilarious Series

This portfolio appears in VICE Magazine's 2019 Photo Issue. With this issue we wanted to celebrate the absurd, the lighthearted, and the humorous. It’s important to take a break from the real world. As much as we need to be informed, engaged, and aware, we also need to laugh. We wanted to champion the people making art with a sense of humor. In today’s climate, there’s something nicely subversive about that. You can read more about our theme in the letter from our editor.

Check out an interactive version of the issue here, and why not subscribe to the magazine while you're at it?

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Jaimie Warren is a multi-talented multidisciplinary artist and the co-director and creator of “Whoop Dee Doo,” a community arts project and fake public access TV show created in 2006. She’s also a NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Arts, teaches art programming with NYC public schools (currently through Dia:Chelsea, BRIC, and Pioneer Works), is the recipient of the Baum Award for An Emerging American Photographer, and is a featured artist in ART21’s documentary series New York Close Up. (We told you she was multi-talented.)

Warren was first featured in VICE magazine way back in 2004 and then we just decided to keep featuring her until the end of time. Her self-portraits are at once hilarious, gross, intricate. And over the years she’s graced our pages dressed up as Pennywise the Clown, a nun, Yoda, ramen noodles, Karl Lagerfeld, Justin Timberlake, and more.

When we recently got in touch to see if she could contribute new work for the issue, Warren mentioned she was completing an artist residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, that had decadent old homes on the grounds and she suggested shooting a variety of self-portraits themed around silly characters you might find in a haunted house. The resulting work does not disappoint (and we suggest you pay special attention to the image with the coat rack).