FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BODY LANGUAGES
FOUR WOMEN, FOUR VISIONS
12 March – 30 April 2005
OPENING: Saturday 12 March, from 7 pm – 11 pm
ELLEN BELL, MARI CARMEN CARRILLO, DENISE MOODY-TACKLEY & KAREN NICOL
SECOND SATURDAY WALK: SATURDAY 9 APRIL, 7 PM – 11 PM
MIAMI—Fashion has always had its victims. And, according to Roland Barthes, its own system. But that system isn’t about women, or even clothing, but the abstraction called Fashion. Victims and obsessions abound nonetheless, and fashion, as it is conceived today (as art, political statement, signifier of class, wealth, well-being, or the glib, happiness or sexiness) remains a stubborn and integral part of our cultural and personal mythmaking – or self-preservation. It is literary, graphic, personal, political and connected to pretty much everything we do, naked or otherwise.
“You can't pick up a magazine - The Star, say - without seeing a celebrity ground into a rich pulp of fashion disasters and generally bad hair days. …You can't say that the Paris Hilton types are to blame for the massification of luxury; the luxury companies can do that by themselves. But it is a uniquely American mind-set to be at once clueless and audacious.” – Cathy Horyn, New York Times Fashion Writer.
At Art Vitam Gallery, four internationally-known artists take on the body and the language of fashion in a spectacle of design, art and feminine politics. Understanding fashion means learning the commas and semi-colons of “Body Languages,” the title of this exhibition. Bringing together Ellen Bell, Mari Carmen Carrillo, Karen Nicol and Denise Moody-Tackley, is a celebration of the well-dressed and the undressed, in what will undoubtedly resonate far and wide among the fashionistas of Miami.
ELLEN BELL’s current work is a response to cultural constructs surrounding notions of identity. The British artist, who remakes shoes, children’s clothing, and underwear among other wearables from bible pages, found objects, and a variety of paper ephemera, focuses on the “subliminal messages that resonate in advertising, cheap fiction and instruction manuals.” She says she is “influenced in equal measure by textile art, illustration and romantic literature.” Her work is handmade and emotionally pitched. “I construct facsimiles of wearable objects from found paper texts and images, using these iconic garments as stand-ins for childhood and adult experiences."
MARI CARMEN CARRILLO a Venezuelan artist focuses on the miniature, creating a doll-like wardrobe that is both entreating and foreboding. “In her Wounded Dresses series, Mari Carmen Carrillo speaks of the feminine in relationship to the real of the domestic, specifically the activity of sewing,” writes critic Euridice Arratia about the artist’s toy-like dresses that seem inhabited and animated by invisible bodies. “Carrillo invokes a painfully fractured body that still finds solace in ornament. Her wounded dresses, some decorated with feathers and some with intricately woven patterns, reveal at a closer look bloody incisions, which turn the dress into a metonymy for the female skin.”
KAREN NICOL, a professional embroiderer by trade (with clients like Chloe, Julien Macdonald and Michiko Koshino) brings an insider’s point of view to the exhibition. The four works presented in Body Languages, “are based on the concept of ‘silk purse out of a sow’s ear,’” she says. For a vaunted seamstress like Nicol, whose work is routinely cited in fashion magazines like Vogue and Elle, her art works here show an intense devotion to craft and labor, invention and personal choice. “I am interested in the notion of contrasting the beauty and time-consuming endeavor of embroidery with grounds which would normally be discarded,” she says about her recuperation of objects. “The old papers that have somehow survived our throw-away society, the beautiful feedbag which is used and trashed, the single worn and darned stocking.”
DENISE MOODY-TACKLEY is a Miami-based artist, deeply involved in the de-construction of the American feminine myth. Her work has been widely acclaimed for its acidic and intelligent commentary on female identity. “With everyday objects inherent to a woman’s life – safety pins, garbage bags, mops, doormats and a myriad of seemingly insignificant bits and pieces, I create puns, and twist the seemingly immovable idea of women’s fashion into a new form.” Moody-Tackley will take a wedding dress and, decoding it with a supply of household paraphernalia, reinvent the bride in powerful and hilarious fashion. Her wry take on the American woman will literally have viewers in stitches.
Body Languages is an exhibition that jettisons “fashion” in order to understand how we produced a billion dollar industry intent on writing the script for feminine identity.
“The interest in this exhibition, is to show how these artists – women artists – have taken subjectivity to particular levels in creating clothing one would never see even in the most outrageous fashion shows,” says Sophie-Anne Blachet, Art Vitam Gallery director and curator of Body Languages. “They give the clothes – and the idea of wearing or not wearing them both an anachronistic and completely new meaning, avoiding classic design by reinventing it.”
For more information or high-resolution images of the artists’ work, please contact Sophie-Anne Blachet, Director,
ART VITAM GALLERY
3452 NORTH MIAMI AVENUE
MIAMI, FLORIDA 33127
T: 305-571-8342
E: info@artvitam.com WEB: www.artvitam.com