Beware The Fly!

It’s October, and Gallery 1988 is hosting a horror exhibit called Cover Your Eyes, celebrating horror films of the classic and modern eras. Michelle and I contributed Beware The Fly! — a piece inspired by a couple of our favorite monster bug movies of the 1950s.

In 1958, 20th Century Fox released The Fly, starring David Heddison, Patricia Owens, and Vincent Price. It tells the tale of a dedicated scientist working tirelessly to invent a teleportation device, but falling short only to end up with an inter-species gene splicer instead.

The scientist ends up as a man with a fly’s head — or maybe he’s a fly with a man’s head — it doesn’t matter because misfortune befalls both versions of the ill-fated inventor and he ends up leaving his wife a widow and his son fatherless.

But Fox was back the following year to right that wrong with Return of The Fly! which followed the story of the scientist’s now-grown son. While some might have been hoping for a redemption arc, the screenwriter had more sinister plans. Because somehow, despite knowing his father turned himself into a bug by messing around with things beyond his understanding, the son has decided to go into the family business. Of course, lightning strikes twice and the son ends up in the same predicament as his father: Two legs, five eyes, twitching antennae, and an undying hankering for sugar.

Our piece, Beware The Fly! Is all about celebrating the scientific overreach of those poor, misguided whiz kids. Honestly, for the chance at instantaneous teleportation and the elimination of our need for fossil fuels, I’m perfectly fine if a scientist or two turns himself into a giant bug. To honor those brave, insect-headed geniuses, we sculpted an amalgam of those characters: a man in a lab coat, standing inside a makeshift teleporter, his head and hand replaced with those of the fly who shared the chamber with him when the switch was thrown.

Hopefully we’ve hit the sweet spot at the intersection of nostalgic, adorable, and disgusting. I worked on the clay while Michelle handled the needle felting. The whole figure is encased in a light-up, glow-in-the-dark, 50’s-era teleportation device that not only completes the tragic story of an experiment-gone-wrong but manages to keep dust off the figure to boot.

If you’d like to see all of the horror-inspired artwork in Gallery 1988’s Cover Your Eyes show, you can visit the show at their website. And if you’d like a little behind-the-scenes process footage, you can see our video at the link below.

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