The Road to Shermer - Piece #1

For the upcoming The Road to Shermer: A Tribute to John Hughes show at Gallery 1988: Venice I created three collages. Two were based on Ferris Beuller's Day Off and one was based on The Breakfast Club, which is the piece shown above, Twenty-fifth High Scool Reunion.

This was originally created as a print for my own 25th high school reunion, only I'd changed the coat on Emilio Estevez to reflect the coats worn at my own high school at the time. I replaced the coat with the one from the movie for the show. This piece was fun to do. I essentially had to decide what sort of career paths the various characters would have taken in life, and then I had to age progress the characters twenty-five years. I resisted the urge to see how the actual actors looked twenty-five years later, because Hollywood aging and real life aging are not the same thing.

My decisions:

Ally Sheedy's character, Allison Reynolds ended up as a graphic designer. i toyed with giving her arty glasses, but in the end decided against it.

Judd Nelson's character, John Bender ended up with a job as a manager of some sort of local company's warehouse, or something related where the manager's wear short sleeve dress shirts and ties, and the offices have beat up furniture and filing cabinets.

Anthony Michael Hall's character Brian Johnson wound up as the successful founder of a software company.

Emilio Estevez' s character Andy Clark became a high school gym teacher and after school coach.

Molly Ringwald's character, Claire Standish married a moderately wealthy man and became a housewife.

The choices were all made by using real world analogs and aren't all that surprising.

The show opens February 11 from 7-10 PM and runs through March 4, 2011. Gallery 1988: Venice is located at 214 Pier Avenue in Santa Monica. You can reach the gallery at (424) 238- 5988, or through their website.