Regarding Warhol at the Met

Red Jackie
Andy Warhol
Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 1964
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Copyright 2012, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Andy Warhol is an artist that everyone thinks they know. Even though I've seen quite a few exhibitions of Warhol's work over the years, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years" presented a fresh perspective on a seemingly overdone topic.

With a clearly defined curatorial perspective of considering how Warhol impacted subsequent generations of artists, this exhibition presents five thematic groupings that showcase Warhol's work alongside contemporary artists that have been influenced by Warhol's example. The five thematic sections are titled: "Daily News: From Banality to Disaster," "Portraiture: Celebrity and Power," "Queer Studies: Shifting Identities," "Consuming Images: Appropriation, Abstraction, and Seriality," and "No Boundaries: Business, Collaboration, and Spectacle". This grouping covers the major themes of Warhol's work -- consumer society, death, celebrity, queer identity, appropriation, and spectacle -- linking them to sixty contemporary artists including Ai Weiwei, Edward Ruscha, Kelley Walker, Nan Goldin, Jeff Koons, Chuck Close, Richard Gober and others. Seeing Warhol in relation to other artists that adopted similar themes or modes of working made it clear that Warhol had a profound impact on contemporary art.

Reflecting Fashion: Art and Fashion since Modernism

Wedding Dress 1967 by Christo at the Mumok, Vienna

The intersection of art and fashion is a topic that I never tire of, and the exhibition Reflecting Fashion at the Mumok in Vienna, Austria offers four floors of engaging examples that explore "clothing and fashion as an essential component of art".  The main themes of the exhibition include: Fashion as Modernism, Fashion as the eternal deputy of Surrealism, and From the Three-Piece Suit to the Deconstruction of Fashion.

What's on the Fashion Calendar for March

March offers a number of exciting museum exhibitions related to fashion. The host cities span the globe:  from Los Angeles to Paris and between.

Peggy Moffitt wearing Rudi Gernreich
Photo from MOCA West Hollywood (Pacific Centre)

The Total Look: The Creative Collaboration between Rudi Gernreich, Peggy Moffitt, and William Claxton opened this past weekend in Los Angeles at the MOCA West Hollywood Pacific Centre. This exhibition celebrates the collaboration between fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, his model and muse Peggy Moffitt, and Moffitt's late husband, the photographer William Claxton, who created the distinctive images of Moffitt activating Gernreich's designs. The exhibition features selected looks from Moffitt's definitive collection, with films and photographs by Claxton of Moffitt modeling the clothes. "Fashion will go out of fashion" is one of Gernreich's many memorable declarations, but his designs continue to resonate, and still look modern 50 years after they were made. This exhibition will run until May 20, 2012.

Untitled #225, Cindy Sherman 1990
MOMA

A retrospective of the work of American photographer Cindy Sherman opened this past week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This exhibition traces her career from the mid-1970s to the present, bringing together 171 key photographs from the artist’s significant series—including the complete ―Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), centerfolds (1981), and history portraits (1988–90)—plus examples from all of her most important bodies of work, ranging from her fashion photography of the early 1980s to the breakthrough sex pictures of 1992 to her 2003–04 clowns and monumental society portraits from 2008. In addition, the exhibition features the American premiere of her 2010 photographic mural. Of special note is a gallery devoted to her work made for the fashion industry which showcases her commissions from 1983 to 2011. The exhibition runs until June 11, 2012, but if you cannot make it, the MOMA website offers an interactive digital gallery here.

Prada coat 1994-95 for The Sea at the Phoenix Art Museum 

On March 3, 2012, the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona will present The Sea in the Ellman Fashion Design Gallery. This exhibition explores the far-reaching influence of the romance of the sea on fashion design and includes ensembles from the 19th century to the present time, including Emilio Pucci, Emanuel Ungaro and Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. This exhibit runs until July 15, 2012.

Marc Jacobs at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs

Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs will open at Musee des Arts Decoratifs on March 9, 2012. This exhibition tells the stories of two men of fashion, separated by a century, Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs, and will highlight their contributions to the fashion world. Designed to be an analysis rather than a retrospective, this parallel Vuitton-Jacobs comparison is intended to provide new insight into the fashion system during its pivotal periods, beginning with its industrialisation and ending with its globalisation, focussing also on its artistic professions and crafts, technological advances, stylistic creations and artistic collaborations.

The Art of Kuboku and Hisako Takaku
at the San Diego Museum of Fine Art

San Diego Museum of Fine Art in California presents an exhibition called Dyeing Elegance: Asian Modernism and the Art of Kūboku and Hisako Takaku which opened earlier this month. The artist Kuboku Takaku (1908–1993) perfected the ancient Japanese technique of wax-resist dyeing to create textile paintings on obi, kimono, and screens, merging cubist and modernist styles.  His daughter Hisako (born 1944) is now one of the last living artists who preserves the knowledge of this painstaking dyeing technique, and her obi and kimono continue to be among the most chic and sought-after throughout Japan. In this exhibition 71 obi, kimono, and other textile paintings of Kuboku and Hisako Takaku have been borrowed from museums and collectors and are on display outside of Japan for the first time.

Notice of copyright: 
All text and images on this blog are the copyright of Ingrid Mida, unless otherwise noted. The copying of posts, images and/or text without proper attribution is violation of copyright and legal action will be pursued.

Creative Process Journal: Post-modernism, Cindy Sherman and Marie Antoinette

Cindy Sherman Untitled 225 (1990)

Post-modernism describes a philosophical movement holds that there is no absolute truth because realities are relative and dependent on the parties involved and their interests. In other words, the way in which people perceive the world is subjective. Inherent in the definition is a questioning of the boundaries between categories like male and female, straight and gay, white and black.

In postmodern art, this perspective has broad implications. There is a sense that everything has been done before and thus post-modernist expression often includes techniques like appropriation, bricolage, collage, pastiche, the use of text as a central artistic element, performance art, and the nostalgic borrowing of past styles and themes in a contemporary context. The use of irony, pastiche, parody and subversion are also common.

Photographer Cindy Sherman is an example of a postmodern artist in that her self-portraits capture her dressed in the role of another person but are not really about her or any other real person. They embody a critique of culture and ask the viewer to consider practices of looking, agency, and female identity.

For my creative project "Marie Antoinette Slept Here", I am trying to incorporate post-modernist aspects into this work. The dress itself is a bricollage mash up of fabrics and a nostalgic referencing of the 18th century in a contemporary context. Making it more than just a dress will require more thought and more work on my part.

Some off the top of my head ideas I'm considering include:
* using the dress in a photograph taken in Versailles to create the illusion that the dress was worn there
* making a t-shirt using the obsession collage from an earlier post to wear underneath the dress in lieu of a corset
* incorporating Converse sneakers like was done in Sophia Coppola's film version of Marie Antoinette
* donning the dress myself and taking self-portraits in Cindy Sherman style
* making a necklace of safety pins in lieu of the ribbon that was typically worn with a robe a la francaise
* all of the above!

Project Clock: +1.5 hours      To-date: 15.5 hours

Notice of copyright: 
All text and images on this blog are the copyright of Ingrid Mida, unless otherwise noted. The copying of posts, images and/or text without proper attribution is violation of copyright and legal action will be pursued.

All is Vanity

Oft shall death and sorrow reign (Versailles) by Ingrid Mida Digital C-print 2010, 16x20 framed

All is Vanity is the translation of the latin Vanitus Vanitum, a biblical reference to the transitory nature of life. This theme conveys the vanity of pursing earthly pleasures and accomplishments in the face of certain death and is the underlying premise for my upcoming show at Loop Gallery which opens on Saturday, January 22, 2011.

In this photographic series suggesting the haunted gardens of Versailles, I attempt to convey the journey and emotions of grief. Inspired by the work of Cindy Sherman, Sarah Moon and Deborah Turbeville, I have used soft focus, movement and filters to evoke a terrible kind of beauty. This series of ten black and white photographs pose the question of whether beauty and death are facets of the same experience.

The image above, entitled Oft shall death and sorrow reign, was taken in the gardens of Versailles,  a place which represents the pinnacle of vanity and excess. This photo is symbolic of an apocolyptic moment when life changes in a heart beat.  Catapulted into a journey of grief, you become a member of a club that you never wanted to join.

My familiarity with loss and death has given me a deep appreciation for the fragile and temporal nature of life. And creating beauty is a means by which I have cheated death. In the past, some of my work has been criticized for being too pretty and too impersonal. This work is anything but, and represents a big leap in my growth as an artist. Dark and haunting with me as the subject of many of them, it is about me, but not about me. The journey of loss and grief is a universal experience. 

All is vanity by Ingrid Mida 2010, Digital C-print,  28x34 framed,

I will be present at Loop Gallery for the opening reception on Saturday, January 22 from 2-5pm. Sometime that afternoon, Artsync TV will be interviewing me for a segment on their show!

I will also speak about my work during a Question & Answer Session at the gallery on Saturday, January 29 at 3pm, moderated by Lyla Rye. The show runs until February 13, 2011. For more information, please check the loop gallery blog or website.