Beatriz Monteavaro is a Cuban born artist whose work is influenced by British new wave music, science fiction, horror movies, and Disney World. The combination of these inspirations results in dynamic, colorful drawings of fantasy landscapes that illustrate her wild imagination. She combines detailed work in pen and loose acrylic brushstrokes to create bizarre worlds composed of smaller scenes that read like the pages of a comic book.

Monteavaro’s most recent works detail the exploits of 80’s rock stars Adam Ant, Gary Numan, and the Go-Go’s in a narrative of her own creation. Adam and Gary’s adventure so far has included being turned into apes while retrieving black eyeliner from the evil Souxsie Sioux, securing a getaway on Pablo Picasso’s spaceship, and being restored to their proper selves by Bela Lugosi. In the process of turning them back, Bela set off a malfunction at Walt Disney World’s Space Mountain that caused the dead to rise in Paris. For this show, Monteavaro picks up the narrative with Adam, Gary, and Bela hiding out in Notre Dame after separating from Pablo, who has become a zombie. Marie Curie sets off an eruption in the Adventureland/Polynesian volcano to call on the Go-Go’s, who she has resurrected using alchemy and science, to stop surfing and come to their rescue.

Monteavaro is interested in the ways in which art and music are in a constant dialogue: where one quotes the other or revisits moments within its own medium. For instance, in the title piece of the show, the grouping of the Go-Go’s, Adam Ant, Gary Numan, and Bela Lugosi is compositionally taken from the Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat album and from the Bow Wow Wow’s Last of the Mohicans Ep. For the cover of the Last of the Mohicans album, the group photographed a living recreation of the 1863 Manet painting, Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass). In turn, Manet’s composition took images from a lost Raphael design of The Judgment of Paris and from Giorgione-Titian’s Concert Champêtre. Monteavaro views this example as art imitating music, imitating art, imitating art. She inserts herself into this dialogue by referencing and quoting both music and art history in her drawn narratives.