It’s wild, it’s dazzling, it’s queer and it’s coming to Midtown Manhattan.
A new exhibit, opening Saturday and running through Feb. 19 at the Museum of Arts and Design, celebrates award-winning costume designer and genre-defying artist Matthew Flower, better known as Machine Dazzle.
“Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle,” the first solo exhibition dedicated to the artist, occupies two floors of the museum with an explosive, sexy and over-the-top look at his career. It features more than 80 of Machine’s OMG-inducing creations for the stage, street events and performance art, along with photography, archival video, material samples and audio.
Visitors will see costumes he created for himself and his long-time collaborator Taylor Mac for the critically acclaimed 2016 show “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music;” a wig made out of dozens of pink layer cakes with a fork stuck on top of them; a dress made out of hundreds of eggs painted in white, red and purple; a video of the performance group The Dazzle Dancers dancing to “The Love Boat” that ends with everyone naked; and a song about the artist with lyrics like “she is an American homo-sexual, homo-sexual, and she does it very well.”
“It’s a very gay, wiggle-your-feet kind of song,” Machine, who’s 49, told the Daily News. “It’s really quirky and strange” — words that can also describe the show chronicling the metamorphosis of Flower into the queer experimental theater genius Machine Dazzle.
Born in 1972 in Upper Darby, Pa., just outside Philadelphia, the artist spent his “formative years” in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, before moving with his family to southeast Idaho and then to Colorado.
At 19, he came out to his “pretty conservative” parents, though the disclosure didn’t necessarily shock anyone. “They totally knew I was gay,” he said. “Oh, my God! Gay as a unicorn cupcake with rainbow filling, honey! In high heels — and you know there’s glitter on there.”
After being introduced to — and falling in love with — the campy excesses of the 1980 Olivia Newton-John roller-skating musical extravaganza “Xanadu” as an 8-year-old boy, Machine knew where his life was headed.
In 1994 he moved to New York City, where he would gain his “real formative” education by going to places such as the punk rock haven CBGB on the Bowery; Tuesday night’s legendary Meatpacking District party Jackie 60; and Exit Art, a nonprofit cultural center where Machine ended up working.
Machine’s colorful, extravagant and inventive work fits well at the Museum of Arts and Design, whose mission is to “support artists working in underrepresented craft and design media in creative contexts … and to reimagine traditional techniques and perceived definitions of what art can be,” the exhibition’s curator, Elissa Auther, told The News.
Auther, who’s also MAD’s deputy director of curatorial affairs, noted the importance of highlighting a “new generation of artists who comfortably cross over between categories of art and design and craft with distinctive forms of handmaking.”
A lot of those artists are queer, she said, adding that Machine uses his maximalist style as a form of visual politics tying “queer visibility into a renewed critique of the sex and gender binary” by countering prejudices and defying gender expectations.
Machine’s work has been recognized with a Bessie Award for outstanding visual design, and an American Theater Wing’s Henry Hewes design award — both for “24-Decade History,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Earlier this year, his work for “The Hang” was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for best costumes for a musical.
For more than 30 years, the self-taught designer with a penchant for impossible headpieces and jaw-dropping combinations of shapes, colors and textures has used unconventional materials — including ping pong balls, Slinkys, soup cans, holiday lights, pipe insulation and toy soldiers — in his work.
“I love when I resonate with something that is a found object, or something that is secondhand [and] when I can repurpose something and transform it into something else,” Machine said.
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