Play Nice: Will You Make Out With Me? | Entertainment Picks | Salt Lake City Weekly

Play Nice: Will You Make Out With Me? 

Through Dec. 31 @ Blonde Grizzly

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Your Facebook profile pictures aren’t safe—not from Shaudmo. Shaudmo is the alias of an Orem native, now based New York City, who’s a visual artist, videographer and founder of umbrella art collective Play Nice, which works primarily within the New York City fashion scene. He’s been stealing people’s best poses since October 2009, wreaking havoc by digitally superimposing monsters over profile pictures, then reposting them to the Play Nice page with the original owner’s name tagged. This, he calls “digital graffiti.”

Shaudmo is particular about from whom he steals: pretty girls. His work is “is all very sex-crazed, with lots of machismo. He doesn’t care about girls and treats them like pieces of meat, which [is a statement] about what Facebook is,” according to the artist’s statement. There’s no “hacking” required; these photos are easily grabbed, and by selecting girls (and sometimes boys) with tons of “friends,” there’s instantaneous widespread exposure. And, that’s essentially what Will You Make Out With Me? is about. “It’s not about selling anything. There’s nothing to sell,” the artist says.

Shaudmo has painted several monsters directly on the walls of local boutique/gallery Blonde Grizzly, which will then be repainted in January. Generally, his digital graffiti is rendered via a Wacom tablet in Adobe Photoshop; this is his first real painting, and his first exhibition. Originally, he planned to include four full-size photos of pretty girls, but they were damaged in transit. So Shaudmo improvised. “It’s fine. I’m just introducing the monsters. I want to go bigger anyway, to have more [context] ... something that hasn’t been shown in Utah before.”

Play Nice: Will You Make Out With Me? @ Blonde Grizzly, 15 E. 400 South, 801-355-9075, through Dec. 31, free. www.BlondeGrizzly.com

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