Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art
May 2022, brooklynrail.org
Mary Sibande, The Domba Dance, 2019. Life-size fiberglass, bronze, cotton, and silicone, 157 1/2 × 98 × 118 1/8 inches.
Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art is an ambitious exhibition that occupies two floors of the Museum of Art and Design. Curated by independent scholar Alexandra Schwartz, this show is long overdue for several reasons. First, it was long delayed by the COVID-19 shutdown; second, it presents overdue research into the blurred boundaries between art, performance, and fashion and includes a diverse group of artists into this discussion. While fashion and art have been symbiotic disciplines for centuries—think of Schiaparelli’s Dali lobster print, Yves Saint Laurent’s Piet Mondrian and Tom Wesselmann dresses, or Dior’s recent collaboration with Judy Chicago—the niche of performative garment as contemporary art rather than cyclical fashion has yet to be given appropriate shrift. Schwartz has created a memorable exhibition with works that confront significant global issues, including gender normativity and LGBTQ rights, police brutality, and domestic violence. addition, pieces by well-known artists Beverly Semmes, Franz Erhard Walther, Sylvie Fleury, and Annette Messager are hung in this section, titled “Functionality.” The inclusion of Hair (2011), a sculpture resembling a dress made of artificial hair extensions—a staple of current beauty standards—by Indian artist Vivan Sunderam, is more than just a ponderance on the functional; it’s appropriation of material is also a comment on India’s neoliberal economy, in which the division between rich and poor is further exacerbated. Likewise, Brazilian artist Nazareth Pacheco’s Untitled (2000) is an exoskeleton of a skirt made of beaded pearls with nefarious blades hanging at its hem. The artist, who underwent several medical and cosmetic surgeries to correct a congenital condition, speaks volumes about suffering for a Western idealized beauty in this work.
Also on the fourth floor, the “Cultural Difference” section offers a vibrant and exciting array of artworks. From Devan Shimoyama’s flowered and bejeweled sweatshirt, February II (2019) (an homage to Trayvon Martin), Nick Cave’s “Soundsuits” and Sanford Biggers’s quilted cape, Cape 3—Moonrising (Kennedy Center 4/4/19) (2019) to Yinka Shonibare’s Dutch wax textile-clad ghostlike figure, The Ghost of Eliza Jumel (2015), this part of the exhibition features patterns and colors that clash to spectacular effect, despite some of the darker themes. Mary Sibande’s The Domba Dance (2019) is a showstopping installation depicting a central female figure in a red gown, with arms outstretched. She is flanked by multi-headed and seemingly vicious dogs, leashed to her via what read as veins emerging from an anatomical heart. Above this a tableau of colorfully dressed shoulders and arms emerge from the wall. The artist based the work on a South African Tshivenda initiation ceremony in which young women transition into adulthood. As is the case with many works in this exhibition, such as Blue Days, The Domba Dance could also sit well in the “Gender” section.
On the third floor, in “Gender,” there is a balance between playfulness and solemnity, seen poignantly in Zoë Buckman’s large installation in which the artist embroidered hip hop lyrics on vintage lingerie. With individual titles like Bitch Again, Mama Don’t Cry and Prostitute Found Slain, all from 2016, the artist is paying tribute to her youthful adoration of this musical genre; yet, as a feminist woman, she has grown more skeptical of some of the lyrics, which often glorify violence towards women. Adjacent to Buckman’s installation, two gowns by Esmaa Mohamoud (with technical assistance from Qendrim Hoti) combine ballroom style hoopskirts with basketball jersey tops, subverting the assumed Black male masculinity of athletic clothing. These were worn by both male and female models when they were debuted at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Raùl de Nieves’s Celebratory/Skin Knowledge (2019) continues the drag aesthetic with an artwork created from traditional Latin American sewing and beading techniques and can be read in conjunction with Hunter Reynolds’s Patina du Prey’s Drag Pose Cage (Simon Watson Gallery) (1990). Here a blue ball dress worn by the artist is suspended from the ceiling in the cage in which he once performed. Patina was Reynolds’s drag alter ego. Inspired by the gender fluidity of the club scene at the time, the performance didn’t translate effortlessly into the art world. Located adjacent to the “Performance” section of the exhibition, which includes garments, photo documentation and projected videos, Reynolds’s work, as well as many more in the exhibition, signals the interlocution of art, performance, and fashion in this rich and entertaining show.
Links
brooklynrail.org/2022/05/artseen/Garmenting-Costume-as-Contemporary-Art
Nick Cave, Soundsuit, 2018. Mixed media including vintage textile and sequined appliqués, metal and mannequin, 98 1/4 × 27 1/2 × 15 inches. © Nick Cave. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Devan Shimoyama, February II, 2019. Silk flowers, rhinestones, jewelry, sequins, and embroidered patch on cotton hoodie with steel armature, coated wire and fishing line, 45 × 72 × 12 inches. Courtesy Private Collection and De Buck Gallery, New York. Photo: Phoebe dHeurle.
Karla Knight: Navigator
March 2022, brooklynrail.org
Karla Knight, Fantastic Universe (More Than You Know), 2020-21. Flashe, acrylic marker, pencil, and embroidery on cotton, 73 ½ × 120 inches.
Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York.
Karla Knight: Navigator adds to an impressive litany of solo exhibitions devoted to female artists under the auspices of Senior Curator Amy Smith-Stewart at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Knight’s exhibition is a superb example of how thoughtful curating can present an artist to new audiences, surprising even the most sophisticated art-viewing visitor.
Knight, who lives and works in Connecticut, is a local artist for the Aldrich. While she is represented by Andrew Edlin Gallery and her work is included in important collections (MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Walker Art Center, among others), she is not a household name. Her work, with its idiosyncratic and purposefully intractable visual language, has been discussed in relation to Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton, and bears comparison to other visionaries that remain under the radar, such as Franz Jozef Ponstingl, a Bucks County artist whose work utilized similar motifs.
Navigator occupies half of the second floor of the Aldrich, comprising three galleries and an interstitial space. A medium-sized gallery is dedicated to clusters of Knight’s smaller works on paper. Each group is hung uniquely: from a grid-like installation of twelve colorful paintings on graph paper to more organic arrangements of differently sized thematic works rendered in minimal palettes created in charcoal or pen. Within some of these groups, individual pieces appear as microcosms of larger systems of hieroglyphs or codes. In other instances, crepuscular forms are complemented by lists of phrases or diagrams. These constellations of shapes and symbols read like prehistoric organisms that cannot be identified.
djacent to this gallery is a pass-through area that features a wall-mounted vitrine. This small segment of the exhibition is like a window into Knight’s world: in the vitrine are open sketchbooks with lexicons of letters and characters and sketched forms. In one of these, the artist scribbled:
New Parts From Old
regeneration (invertebrates)
ability to repair damage
planaria
mutate into something new
A found image of a spaceship-like structure in a rural landscape is located below these phrases. Beside this is a closed notebook titled “SPACESHIP NOTEBOOK,” while yet another scribble reads “TRUST WHAT YOU CANNOT EXPLAIN” in red ink. Above the vitrine are four works. In one of these we see the artist experimenting with blue fabric dyes, which are notated as “midnight blue,” “cerulean,” etc. Knight’s color study is a prelude to a painting located on the wall of the large gallery around the corner: in Blue Navigator 1 (2021) the artist paints a complicated system of symbols in white on dyed blue fabric.
The most expansive wall in the large gallery features several of Knight’s large-scale endeavors from recent years. A triptych installation aligns three of Knight’s “tapestries.” This is a new body of work for which the artist sourced 1940s and 1950s seed and grain bags as support material for mystical paintings. The bags have a grainy texture and color range similar to linen and are adhered directly to the wall, giving an impression of artefacts or plans of ancient archaeological sites. Wayfinder 1, Wayfinder 2, and Wayfinder 3 (all 2020) feature Knight’s typical motifs rendered in black pigment: orb-like shapes that resemble atomic diagrams, sets of cartoonish eyes complemented by floating spaceship forms, and rows of ellipses rendered in descending or ascending sizes. Interspersed throughout is a plethora of other mysterious shapes and charts in various colors. For example, in the lower left quadrant of Wayfinder 3, Knight includes a clock-like shape where the numbers run counterclockwise and are anchored at 9 rather than 12. Concentric circles inside this form give the impression of an archaic sundial. This is bifurcated by the muted lines inherent to the found bags as well as other shapes added by the artist: an embroidered light blue rectangle intersects the clock while a circular, stitched form also overlaps. To fully appreciate this floating cosmology of forms one must come closer, allowing these works to open up in terms of intricacy and delicateness, balancing the heavier black forms that dominate each work.
In a final small gallery, the dyed-blue Blue Navigator 2 (2021), is juxtaposed with framed pieces on antique found papers. In both palette and visual language, these connect to the colorful, repetitive symbolism in two works on the ground floor by emerging artist Amaryllis De Jesus Moleski. The Guardians (2015) and Graduation Day (2021) feature exuberant iterations of shapes, from floating eyes and hamburgers to wishbones, clouds, flames, and star forms. The works on paper by De Jesus Moleski may be seen as intentional foreshadowing of what one finds upstairs in Knight’s works, lending cohesiveness to the museum’s displays. It also illustrates the Aldrich’s ongoing curatorial commitment to exhibiting a diversity of intergenerational women artists.
Links
Karla Knight, Blue Navigator 2, 2021. Flashe, acrylic marker, pencil, and embroidery on cotton, 68 × 50 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York.