Ephemeral Architectures #07: NYC Garmentures
Solo Exhibition
Location - Greene Street, NYC, USA
- VCA Gallery Melbourne, Australia
Date - 2000 & 2002
Participants - SLeA / TM / WD / KW / SG / AC / AH / AW / SC / RW / FA / AH / PE-B & AE-B / PN / MJ & RJ / MS / SH / VM / CA
Conceived and produced as part of an ongoing series of works exploring issues of shelter in the contemporary urban environment, Ephemeral Architectures #7: NYC Garmentures improvises upon the relationships between urban life cycles, architecture, garment structure and the human body. In particular, Ephemeral Architectures #7 focuses on land use in Manhattan and the nexus between the real-estate market and the worlds of art and fashion to develop a kind of 'propositional couture' or a 'hybridized architectural garment': a ready to wear architecture.
With its folding together of urban, commercial and body space, and its engagement with the dynamics of the contemporary city, this work explicitly recalls the propositions of fluid city, walking cities, instant cities and plug in cities explored by Archigram and others in the mid 20th C. Operating between architecture and ‘fashion’ the work also and revisits those works such as Archizoom’s ‘cushicle’ and ‘suitaloon’, as well as to a work like Peter Eisenman and Silvia Kolbowski’s Like the difference between Autumn / Winter / ‘94/’95 and Spring / Summer ’95.
Indeed, ephemeral architecture 08 directly references a range of practices in art and design that, in dialogue with the transience and consumerism of post-modernity, have been exploring clothing as a form of sustainable habitation: as forms of modulating the relationships between our body and our urban environment. Thus, similar to the work of Hussein Chalayan, Lucy Orta and to Kosuke Tsumura’s ‘Final Home’, ephemeral architectures 07, investigates clothing both as dynamic structures, improvisatory and adaptive ‘minimum protection solutions’, as well as vehicles for social relation and pleasure.
Beginning with a series of photographs of vacant lots in Manhattan together with their attendant, temporary urban structures, I developed a range of architectural permutational models or structural patterns scaled to fit and to be cut and folded from invitation ephemera accompanying exhibition openings at New York Galleries and Museums.
Nine of these patterns were then transposed into the realm of fabric and tailoring. Transferred into templates made from the real-estate, art, and urban lifestyle sections of the New York Times, translated into garment patterns or ‘toiles’ made from calico, and then cut from a range of boiled wools, blanket material, felted transportation wools and raincoat plastics, these patterns generated a surprising series of propositional or hybridized urban street wear, a garment-architecture, or ‘Garmentures’.
Each Garmenture was then ‘performed’ by a range of Melbourne and New York friends, in whose hands, and on whose bodies, they became variously 'wrap', 'coat', ‘mantle’, ‘dress’, ‘skirt’, 'shirt', ‘tunic’, ‘surtout’, 'pants', even Jedi Knight cape!
The first iteration of this work was exhibited and performed at a special event at the Greene Street Studio, NYC. Here the work was presented as a new season’s pret-a-porter street wear. Invited guests, including a range of international artists, musicians, film makers, curators, architects and design professionals were encouraged to 'model' or ‘try the work on’. This improvisational play, this encounter between 'garmenture' and human body, which is the work, was photographed.
The second iteration at the VCA Gallery in Melbourne, Australia, comprised a showing of all moments and forms of the process, from initial photographs through to a second series of improvisations. This second series of performed works were filmed and screened in the gallery together with a computer animation of one structure folding and unfolding through a series of permutations.
Links
Media
Publication
Greene Street, NYC
VCA Gallery, Melbourne
Photos & Video Sequences
