cj hendry
Bahahahahaha! Oh, Cj Hendry … she’s hilarious, smart and – clearly – insanely talented. Just to be clear, these are giant drawings. DRAW. INGS. So, I’m not entirely sure where to start when it comes to explaining this project. The title is “Copyright Infringement 2.0”, and when Cj posted these images to Instagram last week, along with this description, I was instantly intrigued :
“These were the drawings printed onto the tees. Rather hard making a large scale drawing look like a semi-pixelated screen shot. But, go ahead and google “Richard Prince Instagram Art” because that is who I ripped off for COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT 2.0. He released these works back in 2014 and I remember the uproar at the time…still makes me laugh. I reckon Richard is a funny bitch with a hella sense of humor, you have to be if you make work like this.”
Ok, well now I needed to understand the WHOLE story. I asked Cj’s right hand woman/studio manager, Elsa, if she could explain 1.o and 2.0 … and she did! Here’s the email she sent me :
“So last year, Cj drew a series of Warhol Polaroids. She crumpled her drawings and drew them again. The crumpled drawings were then printed on t-shirts. 100 of each of the six drawings, signed and numbered. The morning of the release we received a cease and desist from the Ali Foundation that prohibited us from selling the t-shirts. The artworks themselves were transformative but we could not use the likeness of people faces on merchandise. With 600 t-shirts on her hands, she decided to “dispose” of them around the city. Over two days, Cj dropped 100 boxes of t-shirts around the city posting the locations on her Instagram story. [Here are the images that go with 1.o] :
Which leads us to 2.0 :
“To celebrate the one year anniversary, Cj decided to take it a step further by dropping 50 shirts per day in four cities over five days. Returning home to do Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and then two days in New York. This time, it was not Warhol Polaroids, but Richard Prince Instagram series. When Prince created this series there was so much of an uproar around copyright infringement so these works seemed like the perfect pieces to appropriate. The works were screenshots of Instagram posts of famous and ordinary people with a comment by Prince at the bottom. Cj chose three specific images with celebrity faces because that’s what she got done for last time.”
Hilarious and brilliant. As usual. Happy Monday.
