Laurie Berg: Say, what's that around your neck? Ewww!

from the Terrifying Jewelry collection

Last evening, dance- and jewelry-maker Laurie Berg brought her perfectly-named, perfectly-true Terrifying Times Call for Terrifying Jewelry to Dixon Place for one night only. The Lower East Side bar and performance venue was turned into a merchandizing party space with circulating performer-models (lounge), jewelry gallery/boutique (lounge and hallway leading to the theater) and Boschian den of iniquity (theater).

I first saw Berg's finished jewelry and works-in-progress at a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council artist salon back in January, charmed by its magpie-scavenged nature, collage-like whimsy, the embedding of old, found jewelry and miniatures. She makes colorful amulets, all the more powerful for their playful spirit. As I inspected the work, Berg let me in on a little secret plan to unleash a new line of necklaces with gummy or metallic cockroach pendants.

Okay, Laurie....

As it happens, this summer I've been all about tamping down my lifelong abject fear of centipedes. Maybe I shouldn't say that because Berg will probably up her jewelry game, but I have long since gotten over the cockroach/waterbug thing.  If you want to really freak me out, try centipedes...but hurry, because I've been getting steadily better at dealing with them.

Well, the "terrifying jewelry" is now manifest, saucily modeled, fashion runway- or bordello-style, towards the end of Berg's performance piece by the likes of Antonio Ramos, Madison Krekel and Carolyn Hall. But I have to say the most terrifying elements were surely the smiling 2-D masks of the face of late PBS painting instructor Bob Ross, donned by dancers--Jodi Bender, Jillian Sweeney and Berg--eerily cavorting and propping themselves around the theater's balcony railings. The stuff of nightmares, truly.

But it's a funny thing with Berg--funny, icky, lovely, irritating and beguiling all at once, qualities and moods deliberately hard to tease apart. She turned a rough alcove into a kind of catacomb awash in frightful/luscious flame red. Here we watched a mound of nude, inflatable sex dolls, rustled by living performers, slip and cascade over the edges of a grand piano. There was a huge fake roasted turkey wrestled and ported around, and who knows why?

Fake votive flames wriggled in the dazzle of their artificial light source, and a "fire-toasted" marshmallow on a stick was offered 'round the arc of viewers seated on the floor, passed hand to hand, as if we were scouts at a campground that also happened to be a mass grave. And brief, fairly random movement kept breaking out and ending up with a dancer suddenly hurling her body backward into the performance space wall--splat!--looking for all the world like...well, like a squashed waterbug with one futile, dead leg cocked at an undignified angle. Electronic experimental cellist Topu Lyo's sound work contributed obsessive repetitiveness crossed with self-medicating, mind-numbing vagueness--the perfect atmospherics.

For Berg's promotion, someone wrote the following:

"With the Terrifying Jewelry Collection, Berg explores the insidious and grotesque things that seep into our lives and 'under our couches,'  turning them into talismans for exuberant defiance and resilience."

If we humans go the way of the dinosaurs--these days, a fate that seems more and more likely--the meek will inherit what we leave of the Earth. The insects and the microbes will survive us. But, in the meantime, maybe these tough little badasses can teach us something.

Too amusing to be terrifying,
an alien makes landing in a Berg pendant.
(photo courtesy of Laurie Berg)

Terrifying Times Call for Terrifying Jewelry is closed, but you can check out some of that jewelry, and other fine work by Berg, right here.

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