culture
‘Can You Tell That’s Me?’
THE VERY SPECIAL EFFECTS OF EUGENE’S TODD BOKICH: MASKS, BOOBS AND SEX TOYS
By Ester Barkai
V
isiting Todd Bokich’s
studio in Eugene, I
get a feeling I’m on a
journey to the heart
of darkness. In one of
the rooms the head
of a half woman/half
pig hangs upside down from a window.
Enormous breasts sit on a pedestal, partly
covered by an old bra.
I also see a lovely garden planted in
the yard. While the place isn’t anyone’s
last stand, it’s not exactly a Disney
movie inside, either.
Bokich, a maskmaker and Holly-
wood effects designer, has been trav-
eling for the past 20 years. He toured
Europe with a rhythm-and-blues band,
worked as an artist in Prague and went
to Thailand on a quest to be revitalized.
Now he’s brought his makeup-artist
business to Eugene and founded Eu-
gene Artist Cooperative.
Bokich originally wanted to settle in
Seattle but found warehouses were all
taken by marijuana businesses. Work-
ing his way south, he finally settled in
an industrial area in west Eugene.
“Halloween is my holiday,” he told
me on the phone before giving direc-
tions to his studio/residency/artist’s
cooperative. “You can’t miss it. It’s the
building with the heads in the window.”
There I find myself face to face with
the bald head of a heavily made up fe-
male with a wire attached for a robotic
mouth.
Other pieces in the front room in-
clude “Primordial Windmill” and “Pri-
mordial Telephone,” surreal bronze
sculptures exhibited with Eugene Artist Cooperative,
which shares Bokich’s studio space. He rents rooms to
more than a dozen artists.
The masks and body parts are available for view-
ing and purchase at MakupArtist.com (the “Make-
upArtist” domain was taken) and are listed under the
categories of Halloween, fetish, female, carnival, cus-
tom or metallic.
I ask about Bokich about his life abroad, and he
speaks fondly of the glass-walled studio he had in
Prague, where on nights with a full moon he worked
only by moonlight. Otherwise he steers the conversa-
FEMALE HEAD WITH ROBOTIC MOUTH
Photo by Ester Barkai
tion back to one thing: latex.
Most special-effects artists, he says, buy their latex.
But he developed his own formula based on a chemistry
book he read. Once he started talking about polymers
and vulcanization, I admit I had a hard time following. I
actually raised my hand once to ask a question.
He answered the way I remembered my math teach-
ers did — quickly and without explanation. Then he
gave me a tour of the studio, past a wall of molds and
back to the vulcanizer he made.
Bokich was always interested in sci-
ence as well as art. He picks up a small
sculpture he made as a kid. His moth-
er bought it from him, as she did other
art, “so I wouldn’t give it to all the girls.”
During grade school he built a rock-
et and, at one point, caused a fireball
explosion. In high school he studied
chemistry and was in charge of the lab.
Then in college he studied science but
didn’t pursue it because he thought he
would be bored in a lab or some such
other place where boys outnumbered
girls.
Seeing me stare at the half-pig face
by the window, he says people love that
mask. It’s called Piggy Sue. “I almost can’t
make enough of those,” Bokich says.
He sold two of them to an Australian
horror filmmaker who had the charac-
ters of murderers wear them. The big
Hollywood studios have in-house spe-
cial-effects people. They don’t need his
operation, which is why his clients are
independent moviemakers abroad.
Besides selling for Halloween and
to independent filmmakers, he sells to
people looking for carnival masks, men
who want latex female parts, “women
who have been disfigured” and to porn
stars.
Mostly, however, to porn stars. He
shows me a photograph of a woman
wearing fake breasts so large I can’t
imagine what size cup they’d be. He
sells size “F” through “J” on his site,
but these breasts look off the chart.
He offers three Trump masks in his
catalog: Hitler Trump, cross-dressing
transgender Trump and zombie apoc-
alypse Donald Trump. They aren’t selling in the U.S.,
though. They sell better in Germany.
We wonder out loud about the reason, but person-
ally I can’t help thinking maybe a Hitler Trump is just
too much.
Bokich himself is a man who has worn many masks.
He’s been a science student, a musician, a traveler, an
artist and a makeup (or “makup”) artist. Showing me
the catalog of his masks, he points to one. “Can you tell
that’s me inside?”
He points to another and asks the same question,
and then again: “Can you tell that’s me in there?” ■
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