What's up! trouvaillesdujour: Costumes

Showing posts with label Costumes. Show all posts

Friday, January 17, 2014

Eyes as Big as Plates, the "sublime elsewheres".

Eyes as Big as Plates is the collaborative venture between Karoline Hjorth (Norway) and Riitta Ikonen (Finland), produced in collaboration with senior models from Norway, Finland, New York, France and most recently Iceland and Faroe Islands. The series includes 45 works in total, along with a performance program and a selection of video pieces. Eyes as Big as Plates will be widely exhibited in 2014, starting with a solo show in January in Fotogalleriet in Norway followed by the Ars Fennica show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Finland.

Eyes as Big as Plates was produced with local seniors, sailors, retired agronomes and 90-year old parachuters. The photographic series started out as a play on characters and protagonists from Nordic folklore, inspired by the Romantics' celebration of imagination. Each image presents a solitary figure in a landscape, dressed in elements from surroundings that indicate neither time or place. As in a folktale where the forest could be any forest, and the sea could be any sea, the scenes in Eyes as Big as Plates encourage a sense of timelessness and universality. At the same time, suggestions of narrative enter in by incorporating glasses, footwear and clothing, revealing traces of the characters' individuality and signs of contemporary living.

Eyes as Big as Plates

All images are courtesy and copyright of Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Sartorial Anarchy; Style and Sympathies by IKÉ UDÉ

Style and Sympathies include a selection of self-portraits from Nigerian born IKÉ UDÉ's critically acclaimed Sartorial Anarchy series and for the first time, the series will be broadly continued and presented. Udé's distinctive portraits, which poeticize colors, sumptuous fabrics, and composition, transcend the traditional aesthetic of portraiture by adopting a post-modern twist. The portraits show a highly stylized world of color and improvisational virtuosity, in which the artist employs men's fashion ensembles that have been culled from various historical times and geographies.

Udé has been engaged with this body of work since 2010, when the first photographs of this series were presented in the exhibition, The Global Africa Project, at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York.

Wherein he is dressed in varied costumes across geography and time, Iké Udé explores a world of dualities: photographer / performance artist, artist / spectator, African / post-nationalist, mainstream / marginal, individual / everyman and fashion / art. His photographic work is in the permanent collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Smithsonian Museum of Art, and in many private collections.

Iké Udé lives and works in New York City.

Style and Sympathies is on view at Leila Heller Gallery, NYC.

Styles and Sympathies

IKÉ UDÉ

Courtesy of the artist and Leila Heller Gallery

Style and Sympathies by Iké Udé

Leila Heller Gallery, NYC

October 10 - November 9, 2013

Featured in the Arts section of the Huffington Post

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Stephan Brigidi's Carnevale Series in New Book Project; Afraid of the Dark, A Venetian Story

Afraid of the Dark, A Venetian Story is a book project containing Stephan Brigidi's photographs and stories based upon his many sojourns to Venice, and will include his prominent Carnevale series.

Afraid of the Dark speaks of Brigidi's personal spiritual quest propelled by some discovered family mystery with ties to the freemason secret society known as P2. The book is about coming to terms with darkness and fear, exploring those sensations, and accessing the powers of fear. Brigidi's Carnevale series, which has shown in the Witkin Gallery in NYC, the Kathleen Ewing Gallery in Washington, D.C., and Gallery Z in Providence, R.I., will be featured as a centerpiece of the book. This series of photographs taken in Venice exemplifies the mysterious Carnevale festival, taking place the twelve days preceding the Lenten Catholic season, and begun centuries ago as a way of release and pleasure- taking in preparation of the forty days of sacrifice.

Stephan Brigidi is a widely published artist whose work has been exhibited through out the United States and Europe. He lives and works in Bristol, Rhode Island.

Afraid of the Dark, A Venetian Story

Carnevale Series

Courtesy Stephan Brigidi

On the Huffington Post

Thursday, April 11, 2013

In search of the Wild Man; Wilder Mann by Charles Fréger

Between 2010 and 2011, French artist Charles Fréger traveled to eighteen European countries, from Italy to Poland, Scotland to the Czech Republic, in search of the Wild Man. A centuries-old, legendary figure, the Wild Man continues to be an important symbol of transition associated with festivals that mark the cyclical patterns of life: the changing of the seasons, special religious holidays, rites of passage, life and death. In full-length portraits, Fréger photographs celebrants dressed in traditional costumes crafted from layers of animal skins, local plants, bones and antlers, which visually transform the masqueraders into a wooly bear, a long-horned goat, a demon or man of straw.

The Wilder Mann series explores man's complex relationship with nature and how vestiges of these costumes and past rituals continue to influence contemporary life, even in the digital age.

Charles Fréger lives and works in Rouen, France.

The Wilder Mann is currently on exhibit at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.
April 11 - May 18, 2013

Charles Fréger

Wilder Mann

Babugeri, Bansko, Bulgaria, 2010-2011

Caretos, Lazarim, Portugal, 2010-2011
© Charles Fréger, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Cerbul (Stag), Corlata, Romania, 2010-2011

Laufr (Jumper), Trebic, Czech Republic, 2010-2011

Ursul (Bear), Palanca, Romania, 2010-2011

Courtesy the artist and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Charles Fréger, Wilder Mann

April 11 - May 18, 2013

On the Huffington Post

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Christian Tagliavini''s "Jeu de Cartes"

With a penchant for the whirls of fortune and a clin d'oeil to the relativity of vision, the Swiss-Italian artist Christian Tagliavini issues his very own "Carte".

The tittle means "playing cards", but cards, markings and figures do keep their names and mystery in Italian. You will meet characters clad in imaginary, timeless, paper and textile costumes with selected accents of color, making an original and voluptuous code of décor. Their bodies are real, while their gestures surrender, threaten, implore, betray, poison, seduce or irresistibly elude the viewer.

All the characters live in a visible but not tangible territory between bi and try-dimensional, totally created, materially hand-crafted and immortalized by the artist with the final photographic "click".
We could say that Tagliavini once again explored the paradoxical limits of flat and thick to invent something like flathickness.

Christian Tagliavini lives and works in Lugano, Switzerland, and is now solely devoted to art photography.

Carte

Inventing flathickness

Monday, February 4, 2013

50 Fabulous Frocks at the Fashion Museum in Bath, UK

This year 2013 the Fashion Museum celebrates its 50th anniversary in Bath. The 50 Fabulous Frocks exhibition will include the iconic and influential names of 20th century couture - Schiaparelli, Poiret, Vionnet, Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent - as well as today's most desired fashion designers and brands - Erdem, Burberry, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood, Ossie Clark, Comme des Garçons and John Rocha. This display will show both the richness of the Fashion Museum's collection as well as key moments in fashion history that continue to provide inspiration for modern day designers along with makers of period TV dramas and films such as Downton Abbey, The Great Gatsby and Anna Karenina.

Also on display will be curious pieces from the Fashion Museum's world-class collection of original objects, such as a Champagne Dress worn at a fancy dress party in Edwardian times.

We hope that the 50 Frocks illustrate a 'slice' of the Fashion Museum collection, which numbers between eighty and one hundred thousands objects and has become a source of inspiration for fashion fans around the world. Some of the pieces in the show illustrate a personal wardrobe moment, while others mark an iconic moment in fashion history.
~~~Rosemary Harden, Museum Manager

50 Fabulous Frocks