That's Lady Gaga staring seductively from the Design Warehouse window on Marcy Street — in the form of an art installation made from more than 47,000 drinking straws.

Artist/designer Brian Chen put the piece together in time for Black Friday. It will stay up through the holidays.

Lady Gaga's image, with a Cleopatra hairdo and a veil coyly covering her mouth, is from her 2009 album The Fame Monster.

"It's made out of straws, so as you walk by, you can actually see through the store and it's kind of like a porous facade, a lot of lights, and there's a translucent kind of aspect to it," Chen said.

The 22-year-old Morristown, N.J., native finished a Bachelor of Science degree in architecture in June at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and moved to Santa Fe the next month.

Larry Keller, owner of Design Warehouse at 101 W. Marcy St., said Chen walked into his store this fall to ask him if he would be interested in a drinking-straw art installation for the holidays.

In previous years, the store has had holiday windows with themes based on the films Where The Wild Things Are and March of the Penguins, and even Martha Stewart in jail.

"For me, a good Christmas window brings in a piece of popular culture," Keller said. "It's not just a diorama of Design Warehouse merchandise — it's merchandise that's somehow connected up with something which is happening. ...

"What's hotter than Gaga? And then I thought of this little — pardon me — pun: 'Gaga for the holidays.' Well, we're all gaga for the holidays. And we have Lady Gaga, too."

Chen designed the 91-by-91-inch piece with a grid pattern. Then, starting from the bottom of the frame, he and Stephen Christy, a friend from Ann Arbor, Mich., spent 250 hours laying four colors of straws — each with a half-inch-diameter and measuring eight-inch-long — one layer at a time.

The two-sided image highlights displays of stainless-steel and white porcelain coffee makers, a telephone, a tape dispenser and other household items, as wells as strings of glass prisms — items chosen to look like glittering diamonds in Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" video.

"The light works beautifully in a number of different ways," Keller said. "When the sun hits it, it glows. But when the whole rest of the store is pitch dark and you just have these floods shining on it ... it's very luminous."

Chen, who works for Andrew Merriell and Associates of Santa Fe, created the installation through his newly formed nonprofit Sojourn Collective.

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.



ON THE WEB

• View a time-lapse video of the construction at www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqKtccR7448.

• Learn more about Shen's nonprofit at soujourncoll.blogspot.com.