AN EERIE UNDERTAKING

PhilaMOCA: It's a weird place. And getting weirder.

Since its 2011 opening, the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art (PhilaMOCA) has been at times an amiably odd arts gallery space, at other times a live performance venue. Through spring and summer 2012, a more definitive picture has emerged of the onetime headstone/mausoleum factory, an image that balances itself between the merrily maudlin and the delightfully titillating.

Where the latter is concerned, PhilaMOCA hosts a July event called "Naked Girls Reading" that features exactly that - nude young women speaking their way through pulp-novel prose. August will bring the first installment of "Miss Rose's Sexploitation Follies," a bimonthly burlesque showcase in which gals shed clothing based on the works of famous film directors. The Coen Brothers never looked as good as when Rose's girls do The Big Lebowski's ballet stripped to their skivvies.

But now PhilaMOCA is leaping into the lurid, the macabre, in a way that could define the large-scale exhibition space, if not its entire now-gentrifying north-of-Chinatown neighborhood. It began in June, with the Halloween-comes-early "Mausoleum Art Show of Horrors." If that wasn't enough, this July - starting on Friday the 13th, no less - PhilaMOCA opens "Eraserhood Forever," a spooky display of David Lynch-themed submissions from artists of all disciplines.

(Eraserhood, by the way, is the nickname of the still-battered industrial area along Spring Garden.) "Eraserhood Forever" is dedicated to Lynch, the avant-garde film director (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) who honed his weird insights at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the late '60s. MOCA will unveil a permanent mural, by Evan Cairo, of the director's first masterpiece, the cult film Eraserhead, and its image of the high-haired, blank-staring lead character and his deathly mutant offspring.

Lynch (who did not respond to requests for comment) often has discussed the immense influence of Philadelphia. At an L.A. party to celebrate a collaboration with Dom Perignon on a new champagne bottle, Lynch spoke of "the mood of the place, the architecture, what I saw and heard and felt. It was very magical, but laced with a deep tormenting fear and sickness. And, I ate many steak sandwiches there." He has also called Eraserhead his version of The Philadelphia Story.

"I don't think this is something the Mural Arts Program would've been interested in," laughingly says artist Cairo, famed for his painting of robots and mad scientists on a warehouse wall at Fifth Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue. Faced with having to encapsulate Eraserhead and the director's twisted experimentalism in one image, Cairo kept the film's black-and-white look but added crackling textures and hints of putrid purple and sickly green. "I threw in disturbing colors," he says, "to maintain the awkward, tense, oppressive mood that the film has, as well as utilizing splatter effects and dot patterns so that you could get that sense of foreboding from a distance."

How did PhilaMOCA get to be so, so eerie?

Good story. In 2008, Wes Pentz - also known as Diplo, the Grammy-nominated DJ and world-renowned producer - purchased the North 12th Street space. Once filled with ornate 19th-century design touches, the warehouse had fallen into disrepair before Diplo bought it and turned it into a mixed-use studio and office space for his Mad Decent record label.

The old stone building with the Finney & Son script that reads "Established 1850" engraved atop its windows was a great space for the occasional wild dance party. "The place was disgusting at first - all falling down, with rats in the toilets," Diplo told me in 2008. "It creeped me out - especially one time when I was drunk. I wanted to see the attic, so we had to crawl through this hole in the bathroom with just cellphone lights to guide us. We found a bunch of old diaries and headstone engravings, so it was cool."

In October 2010, Diplo leased the building to curator/gallery director Gavin Hecker, who did his own redesign of the property. In January 2011 PhilaMOCA was born. Now, Eric Bresler is PhilaMOCA's curator, calling shots and booking events, with Hecker advising from New York.

"I'm PhilaMOCA's second generation," says Bresler, who has spent his last 15 years in Philly - including two apartments in the Eraserhood - in film-related activities. He was managing director of the Philadelphia Film Society and was also an adjunct professor of cinema studies at Drexel University.

Along with his duties at PhilaMOCA, Bresler is currently program director for the Awesome Fest film series, curator of the biannual Unknown Japan screening series for the Japan America Society, and the site editor of Cinedelphia.com.

"I also come from the West Philly basement-show community," says Bresler, "so I have a definite DIY approach toward curating, which suits PhilaMOCA well, as we're not a nonprofit."

From his high school days in New York, Bresler has been a huge admirer of Lynch. He even wrote about Eraserhead in his application essay to Drexel. He knew about the Philly impact on the director's aesthetic.

"There's a great interview on his Short Films DVD," Bresler says, "where he talks about buying his first camera at a Ritz in Center City, and how the biggest influence on his life was his time in Philadelphia. So a Lynch-themed celebration is an idea I've had for years."

With cocurator Chip Schwartz, Bresler gathered local lounge-rockabilly and eerie electronic acts, burlesque performers, and painters whose work mirrored Lynch's diabolical sounds and visions.

Bresler and Cairo realize that as the neighborhood gentrifies, the grimy qualities that defined Eraserhood for Lynch might eventually disappear. "That's why I wanted the mural to be so prominent," says Cairo. "No matter how clean and neat they make this area, they'll always have that giant head and spitting chicken baby on the walls of that building."

The nickname Eraserhood is itself in danger. Amid neighborhood revitalization and renewal, other names are bouncing around ("Callowhill" and "West Poplar," for example). So it was high time to preserve the old nickname and its gestalt. "I'd like PhilaMOCA to remain a part of the 'underground' for as long as possible," Bresler says. "I think it's important to embrace the building's former status as a showroom for tombstones and mausoleums, at least once in a while."