Auntie's work

May 11, 2008 was my Great Aunt Ellen's 90th birthday. She has always been a crafty one, that Aunt Ellen. And I don't just mean she's sly (which she is). I always remember seeing crocheted and embroidered bits and bobs not only around her house, but around all of our relatives' homes. Auntie was always giving away afghans, tissue box covers, doilies, you name it! If she could hook it, she'd make it. In honor of Auntie's birthday (and who my middle name came from) here are a few images of items she's made for me:


(afghan)

I am so grateful for these particular gifts, and for all the interesting things my family has made for me over the years. My Aunt Bev painted beautiful ceramics, my mother and grandmother crocheted and knitted lovely things, my Aunt Kathy makes gorgeous sewn decorations too. I'd love to see pictures or here stories of other people's handmade treasures and heirlooms. It's so wonderful to have things wrought by a loved one's own hands, don't you think?


(toilet paper cover!)

My own toenail necklace of sorts....

A little project of organizing some trinkets last weekend....click image to enlarge

Biorhythm

When I was growing up, my dad and I sometimes went on road trips. To visit family mostly, which meant going to or through New Jersey. And there was one rest stop we would always brake for. This rest stop had a machine that read your Biorhythms! You would put in a quarter or 50 cents, enter your information, and you would get a printout like the one above. The science of Biorhythms actually goes back to the turn of the 20th century, and was of great interest to Freud while he was developing his psychoanalytic concepts. The back of the card explained how to read your Bio-chart. I wish I could find a snapshot of the machine itself. When it was calculationg your Bio-chart it made this great bleepy calculate-y noise. Sometime in my late teens, maybe when we were visiting colleges, the machine was no longer at our regular pit stop. I found this Biorhythm while I was cleaning out my closet to bring out the winter clothes....

There's a beautiful book explaining Biorhythms here:



Or you can get your own Biorythm readout by downloading a program for your PC (note: it's Windows only so I haven't tried it and I can't vouch for it's worth or if it even works at all). You can also try entering your data on this one for a quick readout.

Jack Spade's fashion show

Kottke explains:

Jack Spade held an impromptu fashion show in Bryant Park outside the giant tent where Fashion Week was happening, enlisting passersby to carry Jack Spade bags up and back on the sidewalk.

See it here. Brilliant!

The saddest objects

A Mental Floss post mentioned the book Owl at Home, by Arnold Lobel who:

sets out to brew a pot of “tear-water tea”–and, naturally, in order to do so he must imagine and then dwell upon the saddest objects possible

This reminded me of a game Justin & I sometimes play with his brother Cory, called the "Sad Game". It started out one night before Thanksgiving when we were all driving up to a cabin in the mountains for a long weekend with family and, as we were zooming down the highway, we all caught a glimpse of a man sitting alone in a fast food restaurant. Justin said he bet the man was divorced, and I followed he probably wasn't allowed to spend time with his kids unsupervised. Cory quietly added that he was also an only child whose adoptive parents had passed away in a car accident. When he was a teenager, Justin finished. And so the "Sad Game" was born. Sad theories grow and grow until the listeners can't bear it anymore and beg for the game to end. I don't think any of have even read Owl at Home.

Did you see this?

It was here recently, with this info:

Takkiainen...is designed to help the wearer to get in contact with others. Since we brush against each other every day as we move around in the city, we can use our clothes as a medium for meeting people and communicating with them. The jacket is made out of Velcro strips of different widths that have been sewn together side by side to form alternating hook and pile stripes.

And from there I clicked to the designers sweet website:
www.com-pa-ny.com
And then I saw all of their other awesome work, my favorites:


Dance shoes


Beard wear

Living in a mall

Secret apartment in a mall in Providence RI.
CNN gives the mainstream view.
Kind of the total opposite of Monday's post.

Jolie laide?

Sydney, a design production associate for Blueprint magazine posted on the mag's blog about a brilliant portrait she had commissioned. She says in part:

Throughout history, portraiture has typically aimed to make the sitter look his or her best (if not drastically, unrecognizably better). But I'm tired of the same old 'smile and look pretty' shtick. It's time to get ugly.

She hired Reverend Aitor, a Toronto-based artist and member of art collective Misanthrope Specialty Co. whose "Unflattering Portraits" series is just that. In the best way of course. You can see all of them here.

Great Eastern Hotel

you make my heart go boom boom, Reception desk at the Great Eastern Hotel


The Great Eastern Hotel near Liverpool Street in London does not have a website of it's own. You can find a desription of it at the Hyatt website, of which chain it is a part. But that information doesn't really do it justice:

LUXURY LONDON HOTEL The five star Great Eastern Hotel, located in The City, London’s financial district, is a quintessential English modern hotel, housed in its historical building adjacent to Liverpool Street railway station. Conveniently located nearby the....blah blah blah blah

The really great thing about the Great Eastern Hotel is the arts projects they support and take part in presenting.




The first project I read about was Adrienne's Room Service by Adrian Howells in June of 2005. The hotel put Adrienne on the room service menu and "A tick in the appropriate box will indicate service with Adrienne included. Adrienne will deliver your order, serve you where required and spend an hour in your company eating or drinking with you." Above image is Adrienne from An Audience With Adrienne.




In 2005 there was also Stay curated by Cherry Smyth. The artists from the show include Giovanna Maria Casetta (image above, and who I adore!), Richard Dedomenici (whose website I can't make sense of to save my life, intrigues me nevertheless), and Emily Cole (who does amazing hot landscapes).




The unusual Cast Party Event took place in 2006. This project intended to make parties and social events more accessible to the visually impaired by going beyond the usual meaning of access (physical barriers) and touch on the difficulties in socializing and networking for the visually impaired. They used mobile phones in an experiment to provide each visually impaired guest their own live, remote commentary of what will be happening at the party.




And Julie Henry's Dyed in the Wool exhibition was on display in May & June of 2006. Henry worked with football supporters to design and knit a cardigan representing their clubs. The show includes team cardigans, photographs and interviews with fans and the outfits, as well as the original knitting patterns. The work references 1970s home-made precursors to the kit fans buy from stores nowadays. I love most this idea that if the kit is homemade it carries more meaning.

I hope the management and staff keep doing this great work as a supporting venue. Personally I love the idea as hotel as venue, it seems so rich with possiblities, and I always have a little inkling in the back of my mind when I develop my own work that maybe something will come together that really belongs at the Great Eastern.

Swap Meat

I participated in Coudal's Swap Meat this summer (you can too until 8/31!). I sent the above out in May (top, color-changing hanky from this project and bottom, 2001 book which I don't have online anymore....jeez neither of these scans do my work any justice) and today I received these in return:



Both pieces are thrift store finds from Kim G. at Pulp-It. The first piece is several layers of board cut out in progressively smaller shapes. The second is a hand tooled photo album/scrapbook. She wrote a lovely little story about the scrapbook:

I like to imagine that Sam tooled this piece for the photos of his & Rosa's wedding and then she dumped him before the ceremony.

When I first got the package all I could think about was I wonder who got my pieces! But now I suspect that there is a Kim I. out there with my book and a fading handkerchief. I will def. be googling around to see if I can find it....

oldies

Not to repost the same question all over the place already, but I recently saw this post on Mental Floss about what the oldest thing you own is. Liza, who posed the question originally, listed her page from an illuminated manuscript c. 1450. Chris Higgins, who posed the question again on the Mental Floss blog, noted the oldest thing he owned was a wprint probably from the 1950s....but even more he realized most of his belongings were no older than the 90s. This is the part that I think is most interesting. He also questions what is the oldest thing you own that you use regularly! I think a lot of people have old stuff chucked somewhere, but not really in use. He thought probably his apartment was truly the oldest thing he used regularly (1917).

The one thing I don't think either of them have touched on that interests me is how have the old things you own and use changed since you got them? I wonder if the more they change the more attached you become to them. See also Khoi Vinh and my post on patina.

I think the oldest things I own must be a children's book (Wizard of Oz or Waterbabies perhaps) or a piece of furniture, but I don't have dates on any of that stuff handy, or at all on furniture, and I've never been really bothered to find out. Definitely no books from 1450 in my collection!

we feel fine

Via PSFK I have been looking at We Feel Fine a website that I can only describe by copying and pasting a blurb from their website (much as PSFK has done) and slap up a few screenshots. It's impossible not to spend hours on this site once you start to dig around.....

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)....The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.

So fun to get caught up in sorting and searching for where feelings happen and when. It feels like such a well of delicious raw data. I hope swimming around in it will be inspirational.

The mess of feelings:


The top three feelings are 1. Better, 2. Bad, and 3. Good!


A few about feelings and clothing came up while I was on:


I've also been on the Learning to Love You More website today, which is another sort of repository of raw emotion. The project is all assignments for other people to complete and the results are displayed on the website. The assignments are still listed on the website and you can still participate. Some of my favorites:

I wish I had the guts to do this one!


I would love to do a whole collection like this...


I wonder what my family's responses to this one would be...ha ha!

Cloth

Much like every other person who sews, I have loads of cloth. But I also have a special stash that I have saved since I was a little girl. Most of it the pieces are too small to make anything with, but I hang on to it just the same. Above is a sampling.

Top left: a sleeve pattern piece that my mother cut out in order to make a smock top for herself, but never actually made. I loved this fabric when I was little and it's one of the first pieces of fabric I ever coveted. When I inherited my mother's notion and sewing tools I took these few scraps too. Turns out she started to sew the top, but the bobbin thread kept snarling and so she put it away, I assume to sort out later. I took out the big snarly threads myself many years later.

Top right: a piece of my parents old comforter. I had the comforter myself for many years after my parents divorced, but eventually it was worn out. So I took off the top piece you see here and kept it to make something out of. I made a sweet unstructured jacket during my MA when I was thinking about our emotional attachments to clothes. I'll try to post a picture of the jacket itself one of these days.

Bottom left: the first fabric I ever made. I found a random haiku generator online, ran some of my journal entries through it, loved the haikus so I laid them out in a great font called Cholla and printed them onto heat transfer paper to put on this crappy beige broadcloth. I made quite a few early fabrics this way and I have several scraps from my favorites (one I made a great book cover out of!).

Bottom right: an old sheet from the house I grew up in. I recently took this home from my dad because all of the rest of the set finally disappeared. I made a one piece sort of poncho dress out of it. I guess I should put up a pic of that one too.

Audience participation

Photo by J.J. Tiziou

In art magazine Esopus I read about a dance performance called CELL put on by the Headlong Dance Theater. It attempts to create a performance for one audience member at a time. The piece asks some really interesting questions like 'Who is part of the performance? Why is everyone always on their phone? Am I being watched?' The performance culminates with the audience member engulfed in a private dance that is all their own. The piece premiered at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in 2006. There were 200 audience members overall (which means the piece was performed 200 times!).

I think there are a lot more interesting questions that this piece addresses like: Why is the connection between maker and audience so important?
Why is this group trying to heighten or change that connection?
Where is the line between performer and voyeur (presumably the audience of one is still watching to some degree although s/he is also participating)?

link round up

so. many.

When I started writing online, I thought I would post something everyday that inspired me, or was relevant to my interests (that I would normally just bookmark and never look at again). But I'm finding that there are dozens of sites and links and posts every week that I want to remember and I can't do justice to. There's no time to properly write about them all. I think every Friday will have to be a link round up of all the other pages I'd like to write more about but have just run out of time. Because there will be a whole new crop next week....



Máquina desempolvadora
Adriana Salazar interviewed by Régine Debatty (lovelovelove)

...a girl who creates delicate and elegant (but slightly ludicrous) machines that smoke, tie shoes, pull thread through the hole of a needle, relentlessly measure walls, switch the light on and off, on and off, on and off, dust walls, cry while another one dries its tears....

I am a rabid convert to Style Bubble!






• Acne (here)
• Sruli Recht (here)
• Nova Magazine
• Couture Lab (here)
• I'm not sure I agree with her definititon of label-ista (I would say it's someone who cares only for labels because of their cache not because of any meaning a label carries)
• This one reminds me of my own wardrobe documentation for my MA research
• I love the way she talks about this jacket & memory


I've been reading PSFK a lot lately too. They post a lot, and while it's not always stuff interesting to me, when it's good it's very good!
• The WHY (my personal favorite...)
• Objects that age (my personal fave....no really!)
• Why looks matter
• Kate Betts on how fashion trickles up
• Smart Fabric




Just pretty from Kako Ueda via Phantasmaphile



The beauty of scale

My MA thesis

Final print dress from my MA collection All Stories Have Endings at Central Saint Martins, 2006.

So in order to provide some context for my interest in clothing and fashion I thought I would publish my MA thesis this week. I always write that I am interested in "the intangible qualities inherent in clothing like air, time, light, and action." Publishing my thesis should give some in-depth insight into that simplified version of my interests. I also hope that posting this information will show the design process at the MA level at an UK university. I have received lots of questions about my education there and whether it's what I expected or how it's different. I'll start with my project proposal, following with the body of my dissertation, and finishing with my bibliography and appendices. You can see a collage of my MA work in the portfolio area of my site from the link below.

Project Title: All Stories Have Endings
Research Question: Can one redefine how we experience design and consume fashion?

Design Rationale:
'I often try to have a beginning and an end, because emotion comes from time. but it’s a different kind of time than theatre or cinema..... it’s theatre without text, without spectacle. what I wish to do is something between theatre and installation.’ —Christian Boltanski

Clothing and fashion are traditionally concerned with space, the shape of the garment, its form on the body, etc. but I'm interested in exploring the relationship between time and clothing, whether it's the time in your life you wear something, the length of time the garment exists, or the amount of time you wear a specific item. The affects of time on fashion, dress, and clothing is little explored from a design perspective, unlike space and form.

There has always been something so fascinating to me about someone making clothes for a particular customer. I am in love with the idea that haute couture and made-to-measure clothes from days gone by carried more significance than the high street mass produced clothes of today. Not only because clothing was a more precious and expensive commodity for market reasons (oh the time required!) but because creating clothes in the craft tradition creates an intimate personal connection triangle between the maker, wearer, and the garment. Those days are fading fast because that kind of work is no longer feasible in today’s economy.

I want to explore what is so compelling to me about that sector of design and see if there is some way to keep alive the human, emotional aspect of designing clothes and dressing in our contemporary economic climate by investigating other ways of using time in the realm of dress. I think all the emotional connections and preciousness of clothing today can be related to the connection between time and clothes.

Aim of the Project:
To explore the aspect of time in dress. To consider how to make clothes that carry the emotional traditions of made-to-measure clothing in our changing economic climate and that recognize the personal and public power of clothing and dress through the creative use of time.

Objectives:
• Investigate the relationship between maker and wearer
• Investigate the relationship between woman and her clothes, specifically the narrative and emotional relationships involved and how they can be manipulated with time
• Push the boundaries of what is fashion
• Explore the connections between the process of producing the garment and the experience of wearing it
• Develop prints, silhouettes and texture through a process that takes into account the wearer without losing the significance of the maker
• Design garments, and eventually a collection (S/S 2007)

Intended Design Outcomes:
• A final collection of 6 garments, possibly including hats or accessories
• A textile collection
• Interim work and design development would include performance work developed into written and graphic communication (a book or magazine)

List of Research Methodologies:
• Questionnaires/ethnographic research • Reading • Time • Drawing/design experiments/storytelling • Encounters/performances • Written and graphic communication

Where and How Can This Lead to Design Innovation?
• Design concept: in that I will be exploring innovative ways to approach clothing design
• Marketplace: in that I will be exploring ways to produce and disseminate my clothes and accessories
• Materials: in that I may develop fabrics or surface treatments;

How Do You Locate Your Project in Terms of Futures?
• A new “fashion system” that grants status to the importance of time in dress, as opposed to the traditional view that space is the preeminent value in fashion/dress
• My work will be considering the future in that I am interested in pushing the boundaries of what is fashion as well as encouraging people to think about themselves and their clothes in new ways in regards to sustainable values (particularly introducing longevity into fashion).
• I think the future of fashion is considered somewhat tenuous right now, between high fashion and the high street, the relevance of the catwalk, and the meaning of “designer looks”, much of the fashion world is in flux. I am also flirting with playing around with ideas of technological future and how it relates to the relationships I am looking at, at least in the design development phase.

Identify Key Players in Your Chosen Field:
• Bless Collective • Maria Blaisse • Sophie Calle • Hussein Chalayan • Shelley Fox • Tess Giberson • Imitation of Christ • Nikki S. Lee • Eri Matsui • Linda Montano • Jessica Ogden • Mary Ping • Alyce Santoro • Cindy Sherman • Andrea Zittel

What Will Be the Design Direction?
• Laser etching • Digital printing • Using support fabrics as fashion fabrics (taking materials out of context is my interest here, but the key is texture and context) • Materials that change over time

Key Bibliography:
Books • The Fashion System by Roland Barthes • La Dernière Mode by Stéphane Mallarmé • Second Skin by Marilyn J. Horn & Lois M. Gurel • Material Memory eds. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, Jeremy Aynsle • Body Dressing by Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth B. Wilson
Authors • Fred Davis • Efrat Tseëlon • Jennifer Craik • Marcel Proust
Magazines • Selvedge • i-D • Mirabella

Next...

...please note this piece is © 2006 Kimberly Hall. Do not copy, steal, or reproduce without permission. If you're interested in my work, please drop me a line. Thanks.

Fashion-Incubator

Anyone who works in clothing design or garment construction or fashion, should check out Fashion-Incubator. The site is run by Kathleen Fasanella with help from some loyal friends from the industry. The website is a treasure trove of wisdom and information as well as a laugh and an occasional bite. There are often great discussions in the comments as well, for F-I's readers are a smart set. Of course, the book that Fasanella wrote is the real source of information if you are looking to start your own business. I haven't bought it, only read a few excerpts, which I doubt would please Fasanella, but if I do go out on my own someday, it's at the top of my list to read. I love to be hands-on in the making process and it's a primary motivator for me in terms of starting a business. One of the hardest things working for a big corporate manufacturer as a designer is that I am so far from the making process.

Anyway, back to Fashion-Incubator, here a few of my favorite bits & features:

A simple post about washing clothes with interesting comments to boot. I'm surprised there wasn't more talk about the damage a dryer can do. I really found this one interesting because my MA collection at CSM was made of some fabrics that changed with water. I did a lot of washing machine experiments last spring! When I came back to the US this year I realized the hard way that American washing machines are much more powerful than UK ones. :(

Fasanella has two regular features that I love: Archives, links to articles from the same time last year and the year before, and News from You, links sent in from readers. Both are always full of interesting tidbits.

The site also haas a decidedly sustainable slant with excellent articles about eco habits to develop and organic cotton.

My all-time favorite post relates to my own interests (of course) about invisible components of our clothes. Kathleen was responding to a project called Carnivale of Couture by the Sewing Divas about Ritual Cloth. Fasanella wrote about a purse, backpack, and a couple of jackets that reveal as much in the pictures as they do in her words.

P.S. Pleating!!

Emotion—why did I title it this?

Last week I mentioned this article about the divide between science and art. And how "I'd like to write a bit more about this one...." so I'm trying to be inspired to write a bit about some pages I think are related. ahem:

Basically the Boing Boing post reviews an article in the Guardian that talks about the division between science and the humanities and whether there is a "third culture" that bridges this divide. They review a website, two books, and a writer. Natalie Angier's comment "Science is rather a state of mind" reminded me of this article I wrote about before. But it makes me look at that article from Business week in a different way. Nussbaum talks about "Design Thinking" (his caps, not mine), in a way that makes me wonder what is 'humanities thinking'? Is there such a thing? Or is it the same as "design thinking" and those are the two sides being talked about in the Guardian article? Maybe "design thinking" is the third culture referred to in the article? Sorry for all the quote marks....

Boing Boing also recently linked to a Douglas Adams lecture titled "Is there an artificial god?" that made my head spin (in a nice way) similar to the article above. It feels like such a lovely way to consider ideas about god and consciousness and humanity. Sadly, perhaps, it makes me want to totally live in my head and stop making things. Funny how doing a lot of in-depth reading can put me off of physical objects....it's almost like there iis a real divide between intellectual thought and physical action (hey.....) that happens so very naturally that its unstoppable. Good thing I have studio space this month or I could feel myself heading into a downward spiral of creation (or is that anti-creation?)

Moving on....a nice pair of articles that I really enjoyed finding together:

From Boing Boing, "Love, Internet Style" Clay Shirky's keynote speech from the Supernova conference in San Francisco that posits love as a predictor of technological success.

Usman Haque's own keynote speech titled "I Hate Technology" reported on We Make Money Not Art (aside: one of my very favorite blogs). Truth be told the LOVE/HATE theme doesn't exactly work because the speech was for the We Love Technology day on July 12 in Huddersfield, GB.

Gilbert Austin, Chironomia (1806), plate 9.

Finally, and totally unrelated to anything about (so much for my circular mind melt) is an article from Cabinet Magazine about gestures lost through time

“By the end of the nineteenth century, the gestures of the Western bourgeoisie were irretrievably lost”: so writes Giorgio Agamben in his 1992 essay, “Notes on Gesture.”

This is a pet love of mine. I did a couple of garments related to Alexander Technique in my first year of grad school. Unfortunately I don't seem to have any pictures handy, but maybe I will find some and revisit this. I love the body/garment connection.

P.S. A new blog I just started digging around on....hmmmm!

Dylan Trigg

I found some great posts on a blog called Side Effects by PhD student Dylan Trigg at the University of Sussex in the UK. I'm not sure exactly how I found my way there from Things (my favorite!), but I did also find among my bookmarks a link for his recent book The Aesthetics of Decay. While his main interests aren't exactly on target with mine (place, architecture, urban decay seem to top his list as opposed to my interests in the body, clothing, and emotion), we do have several areas in common (time, memory, light & shadow).

The quotes I loved are:

If, as architect Sverre Fehn has suggested, the creation of a shadow constitutes the origin of place, then how does this interplay between the place of shadows and the openness of light form a dialectics of memory?

Instead of viewing this relation between shadows and light as a transitional phase, in which shadowed place eventually gives rise to the clarity of light, let us think of the relation as the formation of a dialectic between presence/absence, inside/out, and process/stasis. Here, negativity and positivity appear as shifting perspectives, spatial patterns which reach a limit and then disperse.

If a shadow is also its double, so invoking an inherently temporal dimension, then it deserves to be held apart from the perception of light. We are in the midst of the texture of surface, a texture comprised from the jagged, uneven unfolding of shadows, shades, and modulating terrains.

From this post about shadows. And a few more from the follow-up:

Indeed, such is the centrality of light to the formation of place that Junichiro Tanizaki, author of In Praise of Shadows, is prepared to state that: “In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house” (p. 28). Further still, Tanizaki goes on to describe how Japanese design orients itself around “neutral colors so that the sad, fragile, dying rays can sink into absolute repose” (Ibid., p. 30). The emphasis on the neutrality of space as a platform on which shadows form underscores the dynamic texturing of surfaces, as both morphing and enduring in time.

In all of these quotes Trigg is writing about places, but i think these ideas translate well to my interests in clothing right now. I'm developing some new work based on my Shadow Dress that was exhibited at School last year. It got a great reception and I've recently been thinking I should push my ideas a bit farther.

Trigg also writes a wonderful bit about how modern lighting (he posts a picture of a bland office) virtually eliminates shadows and the implicatioins this has on our experiences in that type of environment. That one goes on a bit so I won't quote it here, some of the posts are quite long and difficult to process. I feel like I've been missing relevent academic reading lately. I'm rather interdisciplinary, or maybe there's just not enough critical new writing about wearing clothes. Either way, I'm really enjoying Mr. Trigg.

A few more links about Dylan Trigg:
Interview about his book, The Aesthetics of Decay
Review of the above book
Article about place & Startbucks

studio time

Today I'm in the printshop working on projects of mine and of others. So today will not be the day for thoughtful critical writing that I'd hoped for. In fact, it won't even be the day for a wall paper round up (all my nice links I've been gathering aren't handy). Just pretty pictures today....


Bryan Voell [via]


Sweet tops [via] I want this one!


Lise Lefebvre's aesthetics of domestic sound [via]

Good Boing Boing!

A book about the significance of opjects on Friday July 6. I wish I had this book a year and a half ago when I was writing my dissertation!


Cabinet of curiosities creator is interviewed on Craft Zine found on Boing Boing on Friday the 6th as well. Lovely crocheted sea creatures....

A really interesting article from Monday July 2 about the divide between science and art. Lots of good links to other articles & books. I'd like to write a bit more about this one....

Kosuke Tsumura

One of my favorite web magazines Ping recently interviewed fashion designer Kosuke Tsumura. They talked about his most recent work where he designed 9 ensembles for 9 specific women, as opposed to designing for the market at large.

Now Ping described the project as "Tsumura would interview 9 women. Afterwards he would fantasise about them and would project things onto them – and create a dress based on these fantasies for each of them. Then, photographer Hiroyuki Matsukage would document the women wearing the dresses." But when I looked up the gallery's site, they described it as "he suggested to create the clothes exclusively to women who appeared in his mind. Based on the imagination, he selects the model. Having presentation and discussions with the models, he expands imagination and the fantasy more and creates a dress just for the model." To me, those are two very different scenarios.....but I guess, either way I find the project quite compelling.

I was surprised I'd never heard of Tsumura before, this project seems so relevant and interesting. But when I poked around his website and looked through his FINAL HOME work, I wasn't so surprised. It's a line meant to dress people up for urban survival. Sort of a practical take on the refugee/apocolyptic/natural disaster scene, without the power of Lucy Orta or the vulnerability of Hussein Chalayan. I'm not saying it's "bad", just that it's aim seems to be to really sell the work and reach everyday people and sometimes things like that don't get lots of press.

In some ways this project, I hesitate to call it a collection, felt flat to me by the way it was seemed more of a shallow fetishization of the female subjects. It was a bit too surface, in some ways. Tsumura said he only chose women because he couldn't "expand his imagination" on members of the same sex. Eh, I like someone who's not so afraid in that way. That said, the basic idea is a sound one that I won't forget.

The project is available in book form Fashion Mode to Order as well as being shown at Nakameguro’s Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo

In my explorations, I also found the bilingual art magazine ART iT (that origiinally commissioned the project and am in love!

quick clips

After all that writing last week, here are just a few fun pics:


Wedding dress from the Smithsonian made of a parachute that saved the groom's life during WWII [via]



They keep saying patchwork is hot at work....
fashion ads from Ebony 70-76



National Geographic does an interesting (and disturbing) article about the "shadow person"

secrets

The website PostSecret began three years ago and is hugely well known (also for being the largest ad-free blog on the internet). The secrets very from the very depressing and scary to the hilarious. Recently the website Orato posted an article by Frank Warren the creator of the site. Orato is an interesting site in it's own right, hosting only "true stories from real people." Anyway, Frank talks about why he started the site, how it blossomed, and what he's doing now (a book and Post Secret events). At the events Frank invites participants to share their secrets in person, shows some banned secrets from the book, and for everyone to talk about secrets together.

Frank says, "I don’t think PostSecret is a reflection of a highly dysfunctional society, quite the opposite. We keep secrets for a reason, obviously. But I think the feelings, thoughts, beliefs and fears we hold in private are often the exact same thing that unite us with others. They’re sometimes the most humanistic part of us."

I think secrets are a very interesting theme, sort of related to luck somehow.....

curiousity killed the cat

Italian artist Michelangelo Roberti is making 999 black cubes (20 cm each side) and selling them on his website saying that there is something different inside each one but DON'T OPEN IT! He also says:

"In this deep sense the thing inside the cube is a representation of the Absolute. A good definition of Absolute can also be 'something that doesn't draw its reality from the fact of being perceived'. Curiosity is paradoxical and comes from the useless hope to perceive the Absolute."

Nice.

Also a nice interview with him here

[via]

Venice Biennale

Lots of links all over about the Biennale (entitled: 'think with the senses—feel with the mind'), but here are my two favorite participants:


Felix Gonzales Torres (USA)
America's choice of artistic representation in the Biennale is unusual in that Felix Gonzalez-Torres died 10 years ago. I remember going to his exhibition at the Guggenheim in NYC many years ago, and being delighted to be invited to participate and keep the souvenirs from his trademark stacks of paper and cellophane-wrapped boiled sweets.


Sophie Calle (France)
According to frenchculture.org, "the world of French culture in the USA", Sophie Calle has chosen her exhibition commissioner, Daniel Buren, from the responses to a small ad she placed seeking "any enthusiastic person who could perform the duties of exhibition commissioner". Calle's piece for the French pavilion asked 107 women to interpret a break-up letter from a man she had been involved with. Of course, it was not quite so simple as that. Calle chose the women according to their line of work: an actress acted it, a singer sang it, an editor annotated it, etc.

[images via]

more emotional/narrative projects

At the Great Eastern Hotel in London: Tiago da Fonseca - Bedtime Stories
The Great Eastern does all kinds of interesting projects with artists and designers. They have an amazing staff, and a brilliant roster of projects.
[via]

Social map: "When Andrew Enright and Heather Samples were married in 2006, they had a small wedding with a few groups of very tightly-knit friends and family. They made this graphic to help start conversations."
[via]

Ping mag from Japan talks about emotional wood furniture by Toru Shimizu's new project monokraft.



Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project. This one is my favorite, but there are so many more.....makes me want to rearrange my bookshelves!
[via (but now I can't find the exact link!)]