#FF – Animal Fashion

Isn’t this the cutest? Miriam Brugmann on Etsy

Lovely bird necklace by MimiJewels on Etsy

Bunny! It looks so soft too! Pull lapin – Nouveautés – France

RACCOON AND FOX UncommonGoods

Perhaps the cutest of all! Miniature Needle Felted Pocket Barn Owl by alishaharms on Etsy

You Are a Construction of (for) by Yourself

So, it’s finished. All the millions of loose ends are tucked in, all the bits are added, washed and dried and ready to go. Or not. It looks like a skin that’d been shed, kind of like the snake skins you find behind bushes or caught on nails in attics.

But can you ever really shed your skin? Metaphorically, of course. Can you leave it behind? and do you even want to?  Is it a trap? or is it like your non-metaphorical skin, protecting you (from what)?

Is it keeping you still or providing a foundation to move forward? Is it a construction you made out of fear of the outside world or in spite of it? Is it what you want?

Dress: Halfway and Thoughts

I worked fairly steadily on The Dress for the past month or so achieving a great amount (it’s nearly one piece) and achieving the complete inability to look at the thing in the near future.

I still haven’t come up with a proper title for it, but The Dress is beginning to fit nicely both in terms of my rampant usage of the term (for lack of a better one) and its massive scale in terms of a project (The dress to end all dresses?).

The main idea behind the dress has to do with ambiguity. Is it a spider’s web that entraps you or is it like the net below a trapeze artist to catch you if you fall? It’s an idea I’ve been interested in since moving countries and not being able to bring my friends or my family with me which on one hand is incredibly disorientating and on the other lends a sense of freedom.

This idea is also explore beautifully in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where the relationship between Tomas and Tereza  and Tomas’ lover Sabina wherein Tomas is an incurable womaniser, always wondering about the next woman but is married to Tereza. Tereza can think only of Tomas, but Sabina always remains unattached. It explores basically the pros and cons of each of the three people’s lives in a quasi-scientific, detached way. It’s title comes from the discussion of lightness or freedom of being unattached and not responsible for another person, while at the same time this lightness can be unbearable for not being attached to anyone.  It’s oddly moving for its style and backdrop of the communist revolution.

There’s an innate ambiguity in security and being safe. A prison can be safe and secure as well as life. A relationship can exemplify this idea just as easily.

The method of production has centered on what one artist at Raven Row described as the ‘awkwardness of production.’ The very fact that it’s difficult, annoying, inefficient, yet enjoyable is the point of the  means of production. It wouldn’t have the impact or be what I want it to be if I used a machine or even larger needles or any method to make my life a whole lot easier (sigh). Making this has been a mediation on its production both materialistically and intellectually.

The Web Dress Project: Beginning

My friend Lenny, who you mind remember from the last post, and I have been collaborating on a web-y project. Born from a lot of gin and tonics in July, a large web, fashion-related installation. It’s evolved into the web dress (name still in progress). I have some sketches that I’ll post when I get braver/ get a scanner/ learn to take good macro photos.

 

 

This dress will be worn by me in photographs exhibiting the following qualities: ambiguity, trapped, grounded, questioning, escape, comfort…. It’s exploring the question of whether you’re trapped by things that hold you down or whether you’re grounded and made safe by it. To which I would suggest reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being for a further and more eloquent exploration of this theme.

So far I have worked on the basic bodice of the dress and some loosely crocheted ‘shawls’ to drape, among other things, onto the bodice.

These elements will intertwine and be interchangeable to change the feeling of the finished photographs. Stay tuned!

 

Esquire’s Singular Suit Exhibition

Currently coming to you from the City of Brotherly Love. AKA filthadelphia. (Pittsburgh is still better, but there is a good music scene and a great art museum,but really where, WHERE is Uncle Jimmy’s, Ritter’s AND HOCKEYYYYY)

Anyway, for the past few weeks I’ve been volunteering at the Somerset house where there is an exhibition by some of the world’s most well-known men’s designers and most renown contemporary artists (and a car). It’s still running for 10 more days and I’d recommend it because it’s free and it’s really rather interesting in the different ways each suit was designed to fit a single concept within the strict confines of a suit. .

Well It’s Shiny, but Can You Wear it to the Office?: Esquire’s Singular Suit Review

The suit is quintessential to men’s clothing implying power, masculinity, and hygiene, but how many variations on a three piece suit can there be? Esquire’s Singular Suit seeks to answer this question, and for the most part it answers with a resounding “one or two”, but the suit can be see-through or become a metal enclosure. It can play into ideas of masculinity, or question it. It can be a perfect example of why my boyfriend doesn’t want to work in an office or it can break into the viewer’s space or ask you to come closer and break the tradition form of not only a suit, but the human body. While there were a few dull examples that are equivalent to BBC Radio 2, most suits successfully used various fine art mediums in a design and fashion setting to re-think the ubiquitous men’s suit.

Viewing the suits is a bit of an exercise in surrealist reality. Entering from the formal entrance in the Somerset House, into a beautiful gallery space with inlaid wood floors and chandeliers you see headless mannequins staring at themselves in large mirrors, sometimes reaching out a hand-less sleeve to touch their reflection. The second room has more mannequins being kept company by a wooden female mannequin sitting on a chair, and as you look towards the third room there is bright light, unidentifiable from this room, but begging for examination.

The glowing light leads to my favorite suit. A beautiful suit pierced with large lighting sticks as though it were a still frame in a movie or as if the wearers soul as escaped the confines of the three piece suit. Other favorites include see-through suit designed with Spencer Tunick, a suit electroplated with metal by Antony Gormley and a suit made from an oil painting. These artists and designers really combined their talents and combined fashion with the traditional categories of art and I thought these were some of the most successful, but also some of the more obvious.

One suit, differentiated by being the only one designed with an object rather than artist in mind, was one based on a Ferrari. Its a beautifully designed suit and really captures all that a suit can encompass outside of a Monday morning uniform. I think of 007. Another suit, if you are tall enough, obviously I am not, lets you know with a beep when you are getting too close. It has sensors placed on it and is really interactive.

As always happens, some just don’t work. One suit was just accented with scuff marks, but is a regular boring suit regardless. One is a simple, dull suit with a guitar and a hope that rock and roll can save its soul.

In the hours I sat with the suit, I most enjoyed watching the visitor’s reactions. It’s essential to the life of any art piece and can be very telling about the work, itself. One older woman took a quick look and was visibly unimpressed by all the “ladies suits”. (The suits are cut super slim.) Some just took a quick look and went on with their tour of central London, but many stood behind the suits, looked over it, and took pictures of themselves in the mirrors in front of the suit. Their heads replacing the empty space where the mannequin was missing it’s own. Art meeting fashion, even without being worn.