NEWSLETTER

“I don’t like to do things half-assed. Like if I get fucked up, I want my heart to stop and be like this close to dying and come back and be like, Alright, I’m all set.”

Miguel Mickey Michael Matos Gambona (a.k.a. AIDSBOT), Window Dresser

Taking a cab to a private gallery exhibiting someone like Paul McCarthy’s perverted mannequins kinda takes away from the intrinsic shock of witnessing Santa dumping a shit atop a conveyor belt of candy. You kinda knew it was coming, that’s why you went.

Conversely, walking down Broadway and seeing a pimped out-Darth Vader receiving lightsaber fellatio atop a Chewbacca rug is just plain what-the-fuck.

“I think I’m like the only straight window dresser ever made,” Matos confesses. “Everyone’s a DJ, everyone’s a photographer, and nobody’s trying to push the medium of windows. By working in such a restrictive medium, it kind of pushes me to make my ideas that much more solid, but it sucks because you don’t get girls doing windows.” Aside from receiving only a couple of death threats, complaints from Corky (Life Goes On), and the attention of 14-year-old Marilyn Manson girls, being top man in a gay profession isn’t offering Matos much.

Using the medium of the storefront, he exposes the billion-plus people that walk past the busiest section of Broadway to “the horrors of life, but in a ha-ha funny kind of way.” Faith healings, stabbings, Louima, botched kidnapping plots, and sometimes a butchered Easter bunny are the macabre and cynical images shot at the public with the verve of a bell-tower sniper. “Just get inside people’s heads, that’s all I’m trying to do.”

As Matos went into a rant comparing his work to how graffiti operates in a viral sense by replicating and mentally hijacking people who see it, I noticed a rather fruity scent in the air. Matos explains it’s his cucumber/melon moisturizer topped off with a mix of kiwi and plum body spray. “I just want to smell like a girl,” he says defensively. “Everyone thinks I’m gay because I guess I’m really effeminate, but it’s just because I really hate men. I don’t know what it is about me, either. I had a really bad stepdad or something. I’m just obsessed with women in general, just their shape and structure. They embrace the whole aspect of a curve, and a curve is so pure. The mathematics behind curves is so beautiful on its own, but I’ve never had a double-D chick so I haven’t truly experienced it. That’s why I’m trying so hard to be an art superstar. It’s all I got.”

GEORGE GORDON III

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Photo Captions:
1st Row: From left to right: murdered Easter bunny, Christmas break-in, disposing of the body.
2nd Row: From left to right: dog funeral, dog funeral close-up, mummified family.
3rd Row: From left to right: ER catastrophes, white trash bunnies, knifing a cop.
4th Row: From left to right: shitty party, Santa hold-up, gimps.

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