Courtesy Judi Rosen

What’s Judi Rosen been doing since she closed her East Village boutique, The Good The Bad and The Ugly, about five years ago?

Clown porn.

Okay, not quite. The 42-year-old impresario of Judi Rosen New York is still designing her signature brand of high-waisted jeans for curvaceous women (she has outfitted the likes of Britney Spears, Tyra Banks, Mary J. Blige, and Chloe Sevigny). But she found a second calling after Kid Rock happened to spot her artwork at a group show at Max Fish.

“He called me at 2:30 a.m. and I always like to say that he was like, ‘I’m not really into art but this thing really spoke to me and I want to own it,’” she recalled over the phone today.

The depiction of two clowns in a ménage à trois was a precursor to the works that she created for her first solo show, opening at Fuse Gallery on Wednesday: Ms. Rosen draws images of clowns, manipulates them via computer, prints them onto fabric, and then stuffs them and sews onto them. The result, she said, has an air of “’70s weird clown porn.” 

Detail of a piece by Ms. Rosen.

Before this, her “weird thing with clowns” was evident in some of her clothing designs and, yes, her dabbling in taxidermy. “My Puerto Rican neighbor bought a live chicken for dinner and gave me the head and feet and I taxidermied it and made a clown out of it,” she said, laughing.

If that image disturbs you, you may want to steer clear of the show, cheekily titled “Blow by Blow.” “I guess even with my clothing I like the overt quality of it,” said Ms. Rosen of her sexualized pieces. “I enjoy kitsch and I really love glam, and I feel like all that comes into play. But also there’s this whole female empowerment thing in it (I wish I knew a better way of describing it). There’s a tongue-in-cheek quality of it, not to be taken too seriously.”

Wednesday’s opening, at 7 p.m., will be a rare return to the neighborhood for Ms. Rosen, who now lives and works in Greenpoint. “Oddly the majority of people I lived around in the East Village live around me now in Brooklyn,” she said. “So I sort of got to move without actually moving.”

“Blow by Blow,” Jan. 9 through Feb. 6 at Fuse Gallery, 93 Second Ave (between Fifth and Sixth Streets), (212) 777-7988.