Last week AMC celebrated the launch of two new shows – Immortalized and Freakshow – with a fantastical and chicly creepy pop-up in midtown Manhattan dubbed Immortal Love. For weeks VP+C’s production team had been hard at work creating the experiential space – a collection of beautiful oddities brilliantly set off by a Thursday night event that included a fashion presentation by Cesar Galindo and a freakshow.
Leading up to the event, every day brought a strange new curiosity to our office. First there were the deer heads that made their temporary home in a back corner. Then a double-headed chick came to roost with us. In the final days a collection of dragons made of human skin among other things and displayed like so many butterflies in a natural history museum leaned eerily across from my desk sheathed only in a thin layer of bubble wrap.
After seeing this discombobulated semblance of what the VP+C production team was working on I ached to view the final product. When I finally had the chance to experience the space they had so carefully put together I was floored by the eccentric beauty of the traditional and rogue taxidermy.
While the animal lover in me can’t help but cringe at so many mounted heads hanging on a wall, the aesthete in me can’t help but remark on the exceptional craftsmanship that has gone into the creation of exquisite tableaux.
My favorite part of the event was the fashion presentation, because I felt that it most fully brought all of the shows’ elements into conversation with each other. Throughout the event three fierce animal faced mannequins stood larger than life and in line in the middle of the rogue taxidermy room with two empty pedestals in-between. During the fashion presentation the models took their place on the empty blocks, and became part of the collection of bizarre creatures.
The juxtaposition of a buzzing crowd against the frozen visage of imagined and expired animals was an electric backdrop against which to appreciate the dual presence of life and death as well as the animation and inanimation of the models posing bodies. Cesar Galindo’s beautiful designs and the ferocious feathered hair of the models seemed to reference everything that belongs to culture and civilization as well as what is wild and natural. All of this took place next to a long shelf with about a dozen mythically inspired man-made skulls.
Unfortunately and amusingly, the pop-up is a temporally distinct and brief event that contrasts against the supposed eternity of the “immortal” objects displayed at the event. While AMC’s Immortal Love has already been stripped and disassembled, its images and likenesses live on in AMC’s Immortalized and Freakshow; two shows I plan on taking a deeper look at.
