Squonk founder and his wife to open funky gallery of original work in Blawnox

By Scott Mervis / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

As the co-founder and chief tinkerer for performance troupe Squonk, Steve O’Hearn is a master of large-scale spectacle.

But O’Hearn loves to work in miniature as well, creating such things as phone monstrances, gluppets and prehensile pencils.

In 2006, these objects were the subject of a solo exhibit at the Andy Warhol Museum. Beginning Oct. 16, you can walk off the street in Blawnox and buy one.

O’Hearn and his wife, Chief, are opening the Illustrious Order of Makesmiths (I.O.O.M.), a gallery of their creations in a little storefront on Freeport Road that was once a hospital for dolls.

That’s appropriate for O’Hearn, who’s been assembling parts of things for longer than he can remember.

“I just had some cousins in,” he says, “and, evidently — I didn't even remember it — but they can remember when I was 5 or 6, I was cutting up toys and gluing them together.”

O’Hearn went on to study at the Rhode Island School of Design, as did Chief, and then got a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. In the early ’90s, he formed Squonk Opera with singer Kate Aronson and classically trained multi-instrumentalist Jackie Dempsey. They went from an eccentric band playing the Graffiti Rock Challenge to becoming an internationally known art-rock/theater ensemble that’s currently touring its new production, Brouhaha.

Working on his farm near Tarentum, it usually takes O’Hearn about a year and a half to build a Squonk set.

“It starts with little models just like those phone monstrances,” he says. “I can make [one] in a day and it's a great, kind-of different use of my time to do these really fast turnaround projects. It’s very satisfying to come down in scale from a Squonk show to a little phone monstrance.”

This would be a good time to explain what a phone monstrance is. In the Catholic church, a monstrance is a vessel that holds precious things.

“For me,” O’Hearn says, “it came from really enjoying the ritual and the flamboyant design that a lot of Catholic precious objects have, which came through 2000 years of history…They're very archetypal and multicultural in a lot of ways. But the monstrances that we use are just, in a funny way, honoring giving a Zoom meeting or sending out text. So they visually, and aurally, amplify the image of engaging with your smartphone, which sucks up so much of our time.”

His line of Prehensile Essentials consists of utensils, pencils and household objects … with tails.

“They’ve all got tails that can wrap around things,” he says, “and the notion is it should be fun to brush your teeth or, why shouldn't the pencil caress you back as you use it? And plus you can hang them on stuff.”

Gluppets — gloves meets Muppets — are glove puppets with images of famous people, or individualized for the purchaser with pictures of their heroes, family, friends or frenemies.

Not only do they serve the purpose of covering your hands, “they have the potential of saving years of therapy later in life, if you can work out your little conflicts with your gluppets,” O’Hearn notes.

Chief, who has marketed her work through local galleries, has a divergent but complementary approach that also involves the reuse of objects found at flea markets and thrift stores. She creates fine ceramic pieces, colorful paintings of fruit, cakes and pies and what they call “re-paintings.”

“She gets funny old paintings, paint-by-numbers [paintings] and beautifully naive paintings from Goodwill and flea markets and then paints on top of them other paintings or, inserts them into her paintings,” O’Hearn says.

“I love the three-dimensionality and she's really great at two-dimensional work. We both do a little bit of both, but we do have very different styles. But part of what both of us bring, I think, that makes them similar is they're all joyful and fun and tactile. They're sensual, they're real things. There's nothing very virtual about this little shop. It's about real stuff in front of you. And the joy of making things with your hands.”

Illustrious Order of Makesmiths consists of the gallery space along a small studio where you can watch them work. Its hours will run from 2-6 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, and there will be community events like show-and-tell evenings and drawing workshops. Prices range from objects for $25 up into the thousands.

Like with Squonk, O’Hearn sees this as a way to take the art right to the people.

“I've always wanted to do smaller projects than Squonk, which is so long term and ambitious in scale and format. And she's been making works forever and it's sold through [galleries]. But there's always a dissatisfaction with having a mediator, I think,” O’Hearn says.

“We're just gonna sell it ourselves. Even Squonk, I do the bookings on the national market. Almost all of our competitors and our peers in national touring have agents, have third parties in between them and the consumer. And to me, it's kind of unnecessary and counterproductive in many ways because then there's no direct contact.

“For me and Chief, we want that direct contact. If someone wants to say, ‘Oh, this prehensile pencil is a really stupid [expletive] idea,’ they can say it to me. I don't care. But if someone else says, ‘I can't afford it, but I love that re-painting, it's nice to hear it directly without some agent mediating.”

Blawnox was a natural fit, as they both grew up in that area, and they like their spot on Freeport Road tucked between Maenam Thai restaurant and Old Thunder Brewing.

“We're really looking forward to being part of a community,” O’Hearn says. “Within a week we had met the chief of police there, and it's all very, very charming and lovely. It feels very homey to us.”

Illustrious Order of Makesmiths' grand opening week is Oct. 16 to 19, from 2 to 6 p.m. The opening party is from 4 to 5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19 at 334 Freeport Road. Free community "Show and Tell" sessions will happen first Wednesdays of each month from 4 to 5 p.m. Open "Drawing Sessions" will happen on the third Wednesdays of each month from 4 to 5 p.m.