Discarded warplanes become art on LI

East Hampton gallery owner Eric Firestone and curator Carlo McCormick went to Arizona to raise the dead, bring them back to Long Island and put them on display.

Long Islanders can take a look for the next two weeks.

The "dead" consist of steel and metal, not flesh and blood, and are part of an art gallery exhibit featuring the noses of discarded warplanes.

McCormick and Firestone, owner of the Eric Firestone Gallery, scoured the Arizona desert's boneyard last spring, the final resting place for outworn, neglected U.S. Air Force planes from 20th-century wars. In the vast desert, the huge aircraft that once dominated the world militarily now looked puny and frail on the dusty ground, some dinged with bullet holes, others severely dented.

Firestone, who lived in Arizona for 20 years before moving to New York almost two years ago, says he "knew about the boneyards of military planes, had an interest in them for several years, and knew that the era of the boneyards was coming to an end." He wanted to fuse this history and interest with contemporary pop culture.

He and McCormick, who said he saw beauty and what he calls "aerodynamic sleekness" in the dead military fleets, conceived an idea in the spirit of nose art, a form dating back to World War I and II in which soldiers painted phrases and images ranging from pinup girls to cartoon characters on military aircraft. The duo paid an undisclosed amount to collect the airplane noses, then recruited nearly two dozen artists to transform them into objects of art.

The "Nose Job" exhibit is on display at Firestone's gallery in East Hampton through Aug. 21.

"I thought calling it 'Nose Art' would be too literal," said McCormick, the exhibit's curator. "What the artists are doing is more like plastic surgery. They are really reinventing these noses and at times doing very deep and personal things."

Participating artists include Shepard Fairey, creator of the controversial "Hope" poster featuring then-2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama, Aiko, Peter Dayton, Jane Dickson, Futura, Ryan McGinness, Richard Prince, Lee Quinones, Retna, Swoon, JJ Veronis and Aaron Young.

They chose their own cones and were given no parameters to abide by except to follow their imaginations. While some artists dealt with the original cone shape, others treated it as an oddly shaped canvas or the basis of a new object, as did Fairey, who transformed his into an antique megaphone.

"I didn't have a clue as to what to do with this dented airplane nose," said Dayton, of East Hampton, who worked on his piece for four weeks and tested different designs before settling on his third idea: a cactus coated with light blue flowers. "My first thought when looking at this object was 'American war machine.' You get this sort of retro-Vietnam feeling of bombs and combat, so my first design of black and white skulls lends itself to the idea of death, which ultimately didn't work for me because the idea seemed too cliché. I needed to do something decorative in an unexpected color, so my thoughts went to flowers."

His re-imagined nose is covered in photocopies of flowers.

"Now the finished product evokes a feeling of optimism, and that's what I want viewers to feel," Dayton said.

For McCormick, it all comes down to one man's garbage being another man's treasure.

"When you go out into the desert and see that America has thrown away what were state-of-the-art, million-dollar flying machines, we see that America can be a pretty disposable place, with big plates and a big appetite, but still a lot being left on the plate," he said.

"Nose Job" exhibition

When: Through Aug. 21

Where: Eric Firestone Gallery, 4 Newtown Ln., East Hampton

631-604-2386

efg@ericfirestonegallery.com

Hours: Sunday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Friday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.