Disco Treat (2023) - Printed magazine and presentation paper on poster board, 11” x 14”.

As Steve enthusiastically opened the door to let her in, the shouts of the crowd outside nearly drowned out his words. “We’ve been waiting for you! You look fabulous! Have fun!” The doors shut and she found herself walking a dimly lit corridor with the thump of 120 beats per minute echoing from the final doors ahead along with flashing lights that pulled at her harder than any force before ever could. At last - she had arrived. The center of the universe. Pulling that last door open, she sheds who she was and disappears into the theater to escape eternally into a dimension of light and sound and spirit.

When I cut a magazine for source materials in making collages, it happens pretty quickly. I scan the page for 3 things: items, colors, and backgrounds. If there’s a lipstick I like, the whole page gets ripped out. If there’s sunglasses I like, the whole page comes out. An ad with a nice shade of blue as the background? Yoink! It’s out! After finishing a magazine, I’ll go back one more time to double-check my second-guesses and make sure I don’t miss anything. Then I cut out the items, colors, and backgrounds from the pages, sorting them into their folders.

Fully spread out here, you can see I basically create myself a palette of colors of items and backgrounds.

Keeping this stuff organized makes creating new collages easier. Once I select a color scheme, having it laid out and ready like this just makes it a joy to work with. After pulling colors, I’ll put the rest of it away, so I can have more room to move things around quickly.

In this case, I selected Haylie as a the subject of this collage. After picking the shot I was going to use, I loaded it into Photoshop adjusted some things and printed one copy. I messed up a setting in the printing process of the first one. Something about the paper type. Since I print on high quality presentation paper, the printer needed that setting. Since I left it off, the blacks weren’t as black as I wanted them to be and some pretty severe striping occured. So I reprinted it.

Once Haylie was printed out, and the color scheme was selected (red and blue), I started pulling colors and items to get some ideas and a sense of direction. When pulling things, I just go for the things that jump out at me the most. Here, I found some Warhol Marilyns, a disco ball, and some popcicles.

Although the original clippings I was playing with didn’t end up in the exact spots as shown, they gave me a sense of what I wanted to do. Warhol? Disco ball? Eccentric costume? This is starting to sound like Studio 54!

Now I want to be absolutely frank and honest when I say this: I f-ing love disco. Like, maybe in an unhealthy way. There’s just nothing like it. I really do listen to most types of music from all decades. Metal, pop, rap, jazz, funk, EDM, almost everything. Even yodeling doesn’t irritate me. But there’s just something indescribably wonderful that happens when I turn disco up until it overtakes all other sound. This is the energy I wanted to bring to this piece.

Studio 54, aside from being just a place of disco, dance, drink, drugs and debauchery, was a haven for people who existed on the fringes of society. Studio 54 was welcoming to all people: straight, gay, bi, drag queens, cross-dressers, everyone. “It’s bisexual,” Rubell told Interview magazine. “Very bisexual. And that’s how we choose the crowd, too. In other words, we want everybody to be fun and good-looking.” He ensured the crowd never leaned too far in one direction at all times. It was this dynamic that always kept the place full and extremely profitable. So profitable, in fact, the Feds did more than just raise an eyebrow when Steve was quoted in 1978 to the press saying,“What the IRS doesn't know won't hurt them. Only the Mafia makes more money than Studio 54." So began the downward spiral that would eventually close the doors to Studio 54 for good.

Steve Rubell

I found a few more Items to fill in the piece and keep with the aesthetics I like in all my pieces. In this case: different lipstick, Versace, stars, cheesecake, a Prada record and a heart. As I said in my write-up for “Bombs Away”, hearts appear in every collage made from this point on.

Next, after gluing most of the piece together, I needed the “54”.

Anything I don’t have as a magazine clipping that I have to have in a piece, I just print myself. Finding a “54” to edit was as easy as a Google search. As with everything else, into the Photoshop machine for a quick change to red.

Even though I had the plan to put the “54” in the upper right corner to go with the theme as well balance things out, I still felt like there was something missing. A bit of POW. Then I figured out what it needed. The disco ball seemed a bit lifeless. More like a red moon than a disco ball. So I decided rays were what it needed. I picked a light blue, cut the shapes and placed them.

Since everything was looking good, I printed and cut the “54” as the last piece needed.

After a glue-down and some trimming, I called it good and sat it next to my last work, “Bombs Away” just to see how they looked together. Fantastic.

Lastly I digitized the collage and created the digitial masters, which I didn’t show here. You can see a pic of how I do it for “Bombs Away” in that write-up. It’s just a tripod, dslr, stool and a light. Pretty simple and quick.

Although I had already been dabbling into using colored lighting to create interest in some shoots before, it was a series of film shots with Haylie during a shoot at my former studio that inspired me to create collages in the first place. After the creation of my first one, I was happy to be able to incorporate so much of the things I love into one piece. It is my favorite piece of this type, by far, hands down.

Gotta boogie!