It’s fitting that Thurston Moore’s first solo exhibition, Street Mouth, is debuting directly across from the Knitting Factory, at KS Art. As it turns out, the Sonic Youth front man brings the same DIY attitude to his art that made him famous at the experimental-rock club.

In his own words, Moore is “utilizing some kind of punk Photoshop method” to make collages that showcase New York’s underground scene. Cut-and-paste style, he rips up vintage newspapers from the 1970s, fastening them alongside press photos and overlapping those with personal letters, without ever making a piece look cluttered. News clippings that could have easily been dumped in yesteryear’s trash suddenly become Art in the hands of someone infatuated with counterculture New York.

“I am basing the work on exercises I did as a teenager cutting out pictures from Rock Scene, Creem and Circus magazines and collaging them as an obsessive diarist,” says Moore. You can almost picture a pre-Sonic Youth Thurston Moore, awkward and uncool, rifling through stacks of magazines for the latest pictures of his favorite bands in hopes of someday making his own rock-star dreams come true.

In large (24 X 21 1/4 inches) collages, Moore the devoted rock fan creates montages of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, the Ramones, and Patti Smith. He pairs his rock iconography with images of Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Kathy Acker, nodding his head to the fact these downtown musicians hung out with the great writers and artists of their era. In places like St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery and Max’s Kansas City, the subterranean elite united, riffing off each other’s work and inspiring each other.

Now, all grown up and famous, Moore says, “I can actually drop myself and other referentials into the pieces [and it] has allowed me (starting) at age 47 to create an ongoing open-heart bio-historagophy.” The Sonic Youth clippings and personal letters that Moore pastes into his collages do not feel self-promoting. Rather, they seem like another page torn out of the collage-filled diary from his teenage years. He comes across as posing to be cool but really being homespun dorky in his letters, writing, “I’m going to the rodeo. I just had some fried grits, bacon and root beer. . . . I’ve been doing some boss water skiing.” Even placing Sonic Youth within the context of such legends as the Velvet Underground seems more like a kid sticking his unknown, local band’s bumper sticker on his guitar case next to famous acts’ professional stickers than an egotistic display of stardom. Despite being one of the most influential bands on the scene, Sonic Youth and its front man seem to stay true to their roots.

Street Mouth opened last week to a large crowd. “His mom even came,” said Kerry Schuss, owner and director of KS Art. Schuss assures the readers of Uncool Kids that he did not choose to exhibit Moore’s work simply because he’s a famous musician. He likes Moore’s collages and gave him a solo show after first showing his work alongside Jocko Weyland in 2005.

By now, Moore is no stranger to the art world.
This past February Moore curated Free Living Papers, an exhibit focused on the same sort of magazines that inspired his own collages. Meanwhile, his wife and band mate, Kim Gordon, is an artist with her own exhibit, Dead Already, on display this month.

Street Mouth will be on display at KS Art (73 Leonard Street, NYC) through May 12. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 - 6:00. Admission is free.