Double Walkers: Transfigurations Thru Fashion

December 7 - 16, 2007

Featured artists, performers and models include:
Anida Yoeu Ali, Jessica Baer, Dessarae Bassil, Joey Flores, Stephanie Kim, Alex Lee, Andrea Loest, Danny Mansmith, Erin McGarry, Erica Mott, Robert Nygren, Alycia Scott, and Sara Thompson.

The 50’s housewife.
The hero.
The ill-fated star crossed lovers.
The rebel/outcast.
The sage.
The trickster.

What happens to the archetype when it has reached its limits all together? What happens when these archetypes encounter their doppelgangers or less than perfect doubles in life? Double Walkers: Transfigurations Thru Fashion is an exhibition that explores the realities of these 6 archetypes as materialized through fashion, the body, and the environment.

The exhibition constructs 6 traditional environments and asks: What are the consequences when norms change or become too perfect to a point of distortion?

The exhibition displays many garments representative of these 6 archetypes as well as a deconstructed version, which is meant to challenge society’s image of social conventions. Choreographed performers will engage the audience on opening night by deconstructing and reconstructing the exhibition environment.

For the second consecutive year, Director of Exhibitions Allison Peters of the Hyde Park Art Center offered students of the undergraduate seminar Defining 20th + 21st Century Dress the ability to exercise all aspects of exhibiting dress, performance and art. The students are divided into committees and guided by the Center’s staff and the course instructor, Adjunct Professor Gillion Carrara as the committees freely test their theories and practices in a professional site.

Exciting this year is the freedom to exhibit art, performance and dress in an “exercise” titled Double Walkers: Transfigurations Thru Fashion. Components were selected in a call for entries and will be displayed in the galleries, halls, stairwells and elevators of the Center with preparations guided by a staff committed to the freedom of artists’ expression.

About Defining 20th + 21st Century Dress
Offered during the Fall Semester at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, this course focuses on the relationship of art and dress. Students will engage in a multi-disciplinary perspective based on material culture analysis examining the evolution of twentieth and twenty-first century dress and alternative exhibition practices. Concentrating on the two major directions in the field of fashion that have polarized in the last twenty years, students will study the issues of uncritical dress history tradition and theoretical exploration originating from the development of cultural studies. Through critical readings and lectures students will discuss methodologies of artists and designers like Sonia Delauney, Picasso (costumes of ballet) and Yves Saint Laurent (Mondrian collection). Feminist work and performance art will also be studied. Individual research is encouraged through the SAIC Fashion Resource Center where linking documentary data to material culture enables students to contextualize visual examples and printed matter in a multi-layered way. The collective final project will result in an exhibition at a local gallery where the invitation, press kit, signage, space design and various connecting media, including garment display, will be created.