jane galerie x upper market gallery present reContextiles
reContextiles showcases four California-based artists across forms and worlds. Featuring Isabella Manfredi, Jenn Wong, Raven Fox, and Sharada Tolton, the exhibition recontextualizes handmade clothing as functional art objects and blurs the concepts of fine art, design, and fashion.
The art world traditionally posits fashion as a form discrete from other artistic mediums, even when fashion designers pivot to art and vice versa. ‘Fashion’ is relegated to fashion-only spaces, from museum exhibits of fashion history (The Costume Institute at MoMA) to retrospective showcases of cultural icons (Diana: Her Fashion Story).
Growing awareness of unethical standards in the fashion industry in the 2000s led the slow fashion movement toward more intentional and sustainable practices. The more recent resurgence of home sewing and DIY culture ushered slow fashion’s renaissance into the alternative art realm of the 2020s, a la ‘90s zines and mixtapes. These emerging artists are creating unique wearable pieces to explore new mediums and build community in formerly closed-off spaces – and create new ones.
reContextiles brings the boutique high-fashion storefront to the gallery space to display original clothing pieces alongside the fine art from which they are inspired and inspire. The duality between ‘fashion’ and ‘art,’ across mediums from painting to poetry to photography, questions the construct of delineation and elevates both pieces in the interplay between them. Couture retail space becomes its own art form, and the gallery becomes self-aware as a commercial space, allowing us to exist between worlds.
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Each artist’s work explores the creation and sharing of personal visual worlds that reflect the escape of craft itself, carving out one’s own reality in which to hide away and process. As barriers and dualities collapse, visual elements of fragmentation, decay, fantasy, nature, and time reveal the current of fun and play, while coherently examining the structures and themes still standing.
Isabella’s collage-printed garments join images of organic objects like skeletal remains and foliage with inorganic tools, and her exploration into neutral tones from mostly black and white reflect the theme of third/blurred spaces. Jenn Wong’s jewelry pushes the boundaries of fashion with pearl and spike-adorned chain-link dresses which blend soft and sharp elements.
Small moments are hidden within a constellation of images in Sharada’s dreamy landscapes, in which fantasy and the natural world are both innocent and violent. Rawness and resilience drive Raven Fox’s sustainable punkcouture scrap leather designs, which visually evoke the dystopian reality they resist. The exhibition is a material encounter with collapse and contraction, percolating on themes which clash and bridge to fuse new pathways, recomposing the mycorrhizal network.
