I’d like to walk you all through Dust Portals, which is still up at Prizer Arts and Letters until this Sunday, Dec 17th! If you’re in or around Austin, this weekend will be your last chance to catch in IRL.
I’ll start with one of the pieces I had a hand in creating- the Involution Suit and Shadow Compost.
The suit was a collaboration between myself and Lauren Chester, who took my very loose idea for a silhouette and drafted a beautiful cape and pant pattern. Lauren wanted to include a piped split up the back of the pant, and she drafted and made the most beautiful sheer chiffon western shirt to go under the caplet- we’re still waiting to get better photos of her shirt, it’s a work of art on its own and was still undergoing it’s final phase of completion when we shot these photos.
The idea behind the suit was to acknowledge and contend with the fact that so much of the imagery stitched up on traditional western wear plays into the fetishization of individualism. Although we’ve always strayed from most of the tropes reworked ad nauseam in our paradigm- retelling stories often narrated by wagon wheels, teepees and liquor bottles without directly contending with the repercussions of romanticizing the cowboy - we’re collaborating in the stagnation of our own cultural individuation process. To evolve beyond adolescent attachments to independence, we need to become curious about a more complex mythological language of symbols. Enter the turkey tail mushroom and its mycelial system.
The shadow compost concept was actually born after a conversation with Christina Smith- after very much wanting to break out of the confines of client-led suit commissions when it came to work she wanted to do for the show, she’d found herself confronted with falling back into this familiar dynamic. In the pursuit of circumnavigating old neural pathways, we brainstormed what it might look like to build pieces that integrate a client's energies without burying whatever vision or challenges we, as artists, had been drawn to tackle.
This led to a conversation whereI suggested that she strip all embroidery off a suit and put it into a shadow that lay on the floor in front of the suit. She opted instead to create three beautiful large scale banners to capture her embroidered imagery, but in the following weeks and months I kept returning to the idea of this imagery laden shadow- and how it represents how we continually shed identity but are often left with the vestigial traces of past attachments by way of logos and images we adorn ourselves with.
I crowd-sourced these vestigial identifiers from among all fort members. I asked the team for the bands, the brands, the books- as many of the influences that we could come up with that profoundly shaped us, and that at some point in our lives we utilized to signal to our communities the tribes we hoped to be identified with. We passed all these prompts along to our own Brian Allmand, who added his own and interpreted our ideas into dozens upon dozens of patches, which then were stitched up on a denim shadow silhouette.
Here’s what I wrote up as a bit of an explanation of the suit/shadow and posted on Instagram:
The Involution Suit and Shadow Compost were built to capture the imagination of the archetypal Explorer, for whom the process of individuating once required solitary wandering, but for whom the siren song of evolution now demands an exquisite symbiosis, an alchemical de-centering of one’s own heroic status, a turning toward the needs of the collective.
Wood, fungi and mycelium (our protagonists and mythic embodiments of interconnected complex systems) replace the iconography of traditional western wear; the familiar piping, yokes and decorative embellishments nod to the intersection of pragmatism, craftsmanship and legacy.
Our shadow compost exists to capture shed layers of identity. To honor and decompose the myriad shapes of our past lives. To represent a visual meditation on how absurd are our notions of singularity, of hierarchy, of purity.
Next up, As Above, so Below! Stay tuned.