Shag Magazine available at Come as You Are (701 Queen West), Pink Cobra (758 Queen West), Art Metropole (788 King West) and Good for Her (175 Harbord). shagmagazine@yahoo.com. Rating: NNN Rating: NNN
Valentine’s Day in the art world tends to be either sweet or smutty. Shag Magazine is a bit smutty. In fact, it comes wrapped in a brown paper bag, and nothing screams dirty quite like a magazine so attired.
But Shag Mag is more about the carpet and less about the act. Created by Michael Barker, Cecilia Berkovic and Simone Moir, the idea is quite simple really. You take a piece of shag carpet, get some art friends undressed and/or dressed up in fantasy garb and snap a bunch of pictures of them sprawled across said shag.
With poses ranging from your typical penis in hand or bent-over crotch shot all the way to indecipherable photos where bodies pretzel in a sea of flesh, leather and fruit, Shag is more playful than titillating. Even a series of very pornish shots of Chantal Rousseau climaxes with a pic of her chewing the shag.
