Breaking the frame

On Friday, Aug. 5, 2016, an enchanting starlit night, Beverly Fresh paddles out to the middle of Palmer Lake in Colon, Michigan, with his arms handcuffed to the boat and 36 sticks of dynamite set to auto-detonate in 210 seconds. After an earsplitting blast that shakes the audience to their core, he emerges from the water, unshackled, with a bag containing 13 wallets and watches belonging to the shaken audience.

Beverly Fresh is known around DePaul as Professor Zach Ostrowski, a contemporary artist and musician. He holds several Guinness World Records, including most whoppers caught in the mouth under one minute. He has released two studio albums and has performed and exhibited his work internationally. He is a cofounder of SUPERIORBELLY, a multimedia art and design collective and record label based in Detroit. He is also a cofounder of WILD AMERICAN DOGS, an interdisciplinary art duo focused on producing experimental feature films and performance.

From small towns to art worlds

Ostrowski felt like an outsider observing the town when he moved to Saint Clair, a town an hour outside of Detroit. Ostrowski’s interest in art started with inspirations from the likes of William Burrows, an experimental writer, and Esham, his favorite rapper to this day. Burrows pushed Ostrowski’s idea of the possibilities of what could go on the page or in a rap song.

“Creating your own thing was something I was aware of from an early age,” Ostrowski said.

In high school, he decided he wanted to pursue art when he got older, with goals of making films and writing a book. However, he still felt trapped in the narrow-mindedness of his small town.

Ostrowski recalls his childhood, observing mud bogs and drunken fathers wrestling furniture, something that was seen as normal.

“It would be a farmer that’s racist but listens to Dr. Dre, but has dyed tips of their hair. There’s a lot of mixed signals happening,” Ostrowski said. “I have always been drawn to that cultural confusion and figuring out ways to cultivate it.”

Becoming Beverly Fresh

He then went to St. Clair Community College, where he met all the like-minded “weirdos” from the surrounding towns, such as Thomas Pyrzewski, the other half of sUPERIORbelly, They met at 18 years old and found mutual interest in the idea of building a space to exhibit their work alongside their friends.

“He’s my brother. We’re family. We love art, mixed media and just getting funky,” Pyrzewski said.

During this time, Ostrowski started to create a persona. With a military blazer jacket and a stitched-on wig, a V-neck white shirt and a pair of red boots, he became Beverly Fresh.

“I was drawing from my own life, a fictionalized, stylized, autobiographical aspect of myself,” Ostrowski said. “I can bring in outside interests that maybe don’t make sense together and filter them through this vessel.”

Performance as inquiry

A notable series he created as Beverly Fresh was “Outskirts,” a tour of performances in over 30 towns in the rural Midwest. He uses performance as a means to explore the way culture is created in these small towns. In these performances, he breaks into song at a pancake-eating competition or sings his song “Maindew,” followed by a local guitar player’s killer riff.

“Oh, little deer, deer, deer, eat from my hand, hand, hand, it’s from the land, land, land,” he sang to two little kids on a front porch.

Greg Scott, an artist, filmmaker and sociology professor at DePaul, was inspired by “Outskirts” to create a feature film starring Ostrowski. They instantly clicked and started working on “Bathtub songs: and Other Extracurricular Activities,” a narrative following Beverly Fresh’s journey through the rural Midwest, supported by a cast of Dare-L, the Porkchop boys, a demolition derby driver and others.

“As a writer, I’ll put the craziest ideas out there. He’ll either go with them or make them better,” Scott said, while recalling the writing process of the movie. “I don’t have to be inhibited in my imagination, and I don’t think he is either because we are both down to clown.”

Life is performance

Although Ostrowski’s performances can be jaw-dropping, chaotic and very experimental, his collaborators said the act is not a hollow spectacle.

“What he does is reflect to us the essential oddness of living,” Scott said. “We ourselves are bundles of odd contradictions, and he makes it OK to realize that about ourselves.”

Ostrowski reminds us that performance is embedded in daily life. We code switch between our friends, grandparents, and professors: these are acts that people don’t realize they are putting on.

“I use those as mechanisms, I undermine and bend them, to draw attention to the fact that performances are always happening,” Ostrowski said.

Full circle

Since then, Ostrowski has made a full circle, co-curating the show “I Got Beats in These Fingertips” with his best friend Thomas Pyrzewski at Wayne State University’s Elaine L. Jacob Gallery. The show brings together music equipment from the likes of Ostrowski’s favorite Esham, but also the legendary J Dilla.

Highlights include original paintings by the founding father of funk George Clinton and a 10-foot optical print celebrating the legacy of J Dilla created by influential photographer and filmmaker Brian “B+” Cross.

“When I do a show, there will be a secretary from when I worked in a corporate office, drug dealers with guns, art people, people from corporate boards that support the arts and hip-hop heads,” Ostrowski jokes. “Most people don’t have that kind of reach. It’s not something I set out to do, but it just happened, and I’m really happy about it.”

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