“Some Weirdo,” from Kristin Calabrese’s ongoing project “Everybody Can Be a Weirdo” (all images courtesy the artist)
LOS ANGELES — Every day, a weirdo is born. Some people feel as if they have the word terminally painted across their foreheads and need no reminders of their weirdness. Others visit artist Kristin Calabrese’s studio — as I did right after getting off a plane in Los Angeles, a city I’d never before been to and felt strange in — and declare it. Calabrese both normalizes and objectifies weirdness through the simple act of asking people to hold up a sign that says “Some Weirdo.” It’s an ongoing project that lives online, a universal yet individualized declaration of quirkiness, and an internet meme in the making. Everyone Can Be a Weirdo shows us how “weird” we truly are — or at least think we are when we’re alone and thinking about it too much.
Like many art projects, this one began by accident. ”I’d been doing these paintings where I write words on the painting in graffiti markers before I start the painting, and then I do the painting around the words,” Calabrese told Hyperallergic. “That canvas was too narrow to really be a good canvas, but I was like, ‘oh, it’s such a cute size … And then in my head ‘some weirdo’ came, I don’t know why.”
The people who pose with the sign remain anonymous, a factor that works on a second, more metaphorical level. ”It’s also that everyone, when they’re alone, is anonymous and some weirdo,” says Calabrese. “It’s something we all have in common.”
Read the full story on Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/101292/youre-just-some-weirdo/
