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In Glamour and Mimicry, craft methods and materials of the fashion and interior design industries are examined for their ability to both compliment and antagonize Art as an institutional category. These industries bring up three major points of frustration for the art world: function, decoration, and trendiness. Accordingly, faux finishes, glamorous metallics, and functional objects (towel bars, coat hooks, shelves) feature in this work. The delineations between good and bad taste, the timeless and trendy, the crafted and created are aggravated to upend institutional and historical assertions of categorical hierarchies between fields of cultural creativity.
Centering around themes of glamor and mimicry, this work is heavily influenced by John Berger’s discussion of glamour in Ways of Seeing. Berger relates glamour to envy and status in an age in which consumption is advertised as a tool for upward social mobility. Glamour is material, comparative, and inextricably linked with status and evaluation. These ideas of glamour, comparison, and status has been a guiding concept in making my work. The comparative status of Art and Design becomes more oscillatory the closer it is examined. Does contemporary art ever mimic fashion and design to its benefit? What does that say about the role of art in our world today? Through these questions, I look at the labor that cultural mimicry involves and how this mimicry is tied to the valuing of labor. With mimetic materials and artistic prodding, I seek to tease out the different ways art enacts glamour in comparison to design and fashion, and find what these say about the ways we delineate Craft and Art.
Centering around themes of glamor and mimicry, this work is heavily influenced by John Berger’s discussion of glamour in Ways of Seeing. Berger relates glamour to envy and status in an age in which consumption is advertised as a tool for upward social mobility. Glamour is material, comparative, and inextricably linked with status and evaluation. These ideas of glamour, comparison, and status has been a guiding concept in making my work. The comparative status of Art and Design becomes more oscillatory the closer it is examined. Does contemporary art ever mimic fashion and design to its benefit? What does that say about the role of art in our world today? Through these questions, I look at the labor that cultural mimicry involves and how this mimicry is tied to the valuing of labor. With mimetic materials and artistic prodding, I seek to tease out the different ways art enacts glamour in comparison to design and fashion, and find what these say about the ways we delineate Craft and Art.