If there’s one thing we learned last week, it’s that pizza has a dark side. Sometimes a slice just wants to be dragged down a flight of stairs by a rat and left lying on the putrid subway floor. And so it was that Rizzo’s Fine Pizza hosted “Darkside of New York Pizza,” a one-night-only exhibition of Sarah Sweeney’s perverse pizza drawings.
How perverse, you ask? Well, the one below definitely qualifies as “food porn.”
And this guy might just be the original Slice Harvester:
Sweeney says the six ballpoint and Sharpie pieces shown at the Clinton Street pizzeria on Tuesday are a visualization of “all these things mashed up in my brain that represent good-old, darker days of pizza and some punk, and maybe some Robin Byrd/cable-access stuff… mixed with NY pizza nostalgia, the kind that only comes with a fountain Pepsi.”
A fountain Pepsi inside of a jazz cup, naturally.
Last week’s show was the first to feature Sweeney, a graphic designer who has created logos and websites for East Village and Williamsburg brands, since a painting titled “Whiney White Guys” was displayed at Mars Bar in the mid-‘90s. “I had a couple paintings up right next to the blood-stained bathroom,” Sweeney told us. “My poor mother actually went to that —probably had to wrap the toilet seat up like a Christmas present before using it.”
Here’s the artist showing off her pizza face.
