FASHIONED

Curated by KOOH

10 September – 31 October 1999

“Fashioned” exists in the realm where fashion and art blur. The show is comprised of 28 artists working in various disciplines. The exhibition includes both work that is readily identifiable as fashion related as well as work that is fashioned out of traditional and unconventional materials.

The paintings that have been selected deal with pattern, color, are body related, or use elements of decoration or a formality of style. The sculpture runs the gamut from the ridiculous to the sublime using color and a unique approach to realizing its end. The installation range from interactive to “painterly”. The photography concerns itself with the personal, the fictional and the mythical.

PRESS

Show: Fashioned
Publication: The Philedelphia Enquirer
Writer: Edward J. Sozanski
Title: Art encounters fashion: A mix, but no match
Date: 01.08.99

White Box Gallery reopens with a show of unusual connections.

White Box Gallery, which had a relatively brief run in Old City before closing last July, has reopened in larger a space at 1315 Cherry St., one floor below the Fabric Workshop and Museum. It’s a welcome development, because the Old City space added spice to the mix in that district.
For his first offering on Cherry Street, director Juan Puntes has brought in “Fashioned”, a show of work of 28 artists that he mounted first in his New York gallery, also called White Box, at 601 W. 26th St. in Chelsea. The show was curated by a two-person New York team who call themselves KOOH (they otherwise prefer to remain anonymous). Exactly what the curators had in mind is hard to ascertain from the work on view, however.
Ostensibly, they’re trying to define the terrain where fashion and art come together. Not in an obvious way, with “wearable art,” but with art that connects to fashion either through materials, formats or a way of thinking about adornment.

If you carry that idea into the show, you won’t always be able to make satisfying connections. But you will find yourself stimulated to think about points of congruence between art and fashion.
In a brief catalog essay, critic Bill Arning offers one correlation that strikes a resonant note. He suggests that artists abandon their frustrating search for “eternal values” and apply the fashion world’s more sensible standard.
Fashion celebrates change through a continuous procession of innovations, Arning writes. Art should also consider change as a positive development. By the same token, new forms of art-making shouldn’t be regarded as invalidating older ones.
Noble thoughts, those, but they don’t really connect to the work in the gallery. It’s difficult to identify a consistent thematic thread among it all, and the curators don’t offer any clues. Periodically, specific works remind us that fashion is the preoccupation, but ultimately we’re left with a feeling of diffuseness.

Yet 28 artists are bound to create interest on some level. The show includes conventional painting, wall paintings, assembled sculptures, small installations and photography. Most of the work is unconventional in some way, but rarely outrageous.

For instance, Mike Weiss makes a “self-portrait” by piling up large block letters of the kind used for store signs; the letters spell his name. Rafael Sanchez makes a wall painting from hundreds of black, individually smooched lip prints. Carlos Blanco’s contribution is an oversize shopping bag with his name and Kassel 92, a reference to the Documenta exhibition of that year.

Sanchez and Blanco each refer indirectly to the impulse for self-adornment; in each case, art imitates fashion. Several other artists are more direct in their appropriations. Hunter Reynolds offers a full-skirted dress covered with autobiographical stream-of-consciousness text, while Anna Lascari makes an assembled sculpture from women’s shoes.
Suzan Batu comes closest to the thematic ideal, though—a wall relief in that South Philadelphia mainstay, fuzzy white shag. Art meets fashion, and both lose.

Show: Fashioned
Publication: Philadelphia Weekly
Writer: Gerard Brown
Title: Back From the Dead
Date: 9.12.01

Never being ignored, Juan Puntes keeps on thinking outside the (White) Box.

Last summer, I proclaimed White Box Gallery dead. But I take it all back—for now. Sculptor and galleryite Juan Puntes’ decidedly un-Philadelphian “alternative to alternative” visual culture has resurfaced beyond the sanctified boundaries of Old City. And he’s up to his old tricks, exhibiting unfamiliar, eye-poppingly different work from New York, South America and Europe, along with a few artists from a certain city whose name begins with “P”.
The current exhibit, “Fashioned”—which opened at White Box’s Chelsea, New York, location before traveling down here—is a perfect example of what makes White Box my favorite fly in the ointment of Philadelphia’s art world. Organized by KOOH, a New York curatorial team, the show includes a dizzying array of works relating to the fashion world. It succeeds not only through the obvious use of apparel styles (consider Hanneke Van Velzen’s photos as clothing as personality stand-ins or Hunter Reynolds flamboyant, confessional Patina du Prey’s Love Dress), but also through more cleverly allusive, strictly visual and occasionally zany tactics as well. Strolling through the gallery’s smallish, blindingly white rooms and looking at this work, you realize how hopelessly square Philadelphia is and why—in certain quarters—accusing a work of art of being ‘hip’ is to damn it straight to hell. But White Box has never been afraid of hipness., and ‘“Fashioned” is a charming reminder that fashion is not inherently antithetical to substance.

The show is accompanied by a catalog with a delightful tear-it-out-and-stick-it-up-on-the-refrigerator essay by Bill Arning. Now, how many other Philly galleries are putting out books with their shows? Few can even muster the energy to get out a press release. So while Arning’s confession that he hadn’t recognized the relationship between fashion and fine art has an heir of false piety about it, his argument rocks.

Arguably, White Box has returned bigger and stronger than it was when it evaporated. The gallery now operates a location in New York’s hotter-than-thou Chelsea neighborhood as well as the Philly branch. Puntes says the original White Box “closed because I saw a dead end. Not only economically, but in Old City.” He cites general lack of support, noting that the gallery was popular with artists but suggesting it had been ignored by collectors and the press.
Though he is the face of the gallery, Puntes relies on invited curators to assemble shows. “I would castigate myself too much,” he says. “I’m here to be a producer, I like to be behind the scenes.” Behind a veneer of modesty, he barely conceals his disappointment with the level of discourse in Philly. “This space should be a conversation about contemporary issues. That’s my gift—to be able to do that.”
As a commercial alternative gallery with no board of directors to cater to, Puntes still feels little pressure to sell. “We call the gallery an alternative to alternative not because it sounds cute, but because it’s a fact,” he says. Though circumspect about his financial backing, Puntes insists that White Box is here to stay—at least until he feels like the space isn’t garnering the support it needs.
So go. And talk about White Box—even if you hate it and think what they’re doing is too hip for their own damn good. Sit in coffee shops and loudly declare that Juan Puntes is a charlatan and his gallery is a lost duckling searching for his New York mother goose. Maybe people will overhear you and go see the shows for themselves before White Box gets tired and skips town...again. But like it or not, losing White Box (or any gallery) to this town’s lingering Quaker respect for decorum would be a crying shame.

Show: Fashioned
Publication: Review
Writer: Jennifer Dalton
Title: Fashioned
Date: 9.15.01

The art-slash-fashion, fashion-versus-art discussion was irritating from the moment it surfaced, and yet, just when it seemed like it was over, an exhibition makes me realize the debate might have been about something worthwhile after all.

In the catalogue essay for Fashioned, the inaugural exhibition at White Box in Chelsea, Bill Arning articulates what may have been at stake in the fashion/art hullabaloo, and suddenly I realize the whole thing may not have been about pretty faces, the hip-ification of the art world and the triumph of surface over substance, after all.
Arning argues that what art must learn from fashion is an acceptance (and even embrace) of perpetual change and value shifts, and therefore artists and critics must let go of their desperate search for absolute values—values that don’t reflect that art is part of society, and society changes quickly. I’m not sure yet whether I agree with Arning or not, but his essay and this exhibition have made the whole debate seem a lot more interesting.

Curators KOOH [artists Bill Doherty and Suzan Batu] have resisted addressing fashion in what has become the typical manner; there are few of the usual suspects, no Vanessa Beecroft or Karen Kimmel or Inez van Lamsweerde in the exhibition, and even more shockingly, there is very little photography. Fashioned defines the word “fashion” more broadly and more insightfully than usual, including work that relates to the world of fashion by addressing styles of dress, fabric patterns, or use of textiles, as well as work that is “fashioned” using unusual substances or traditional craft materials. But unlike many broadly defined theme exhibitions, this one is unified by a strong common denominator: all the work in Fashioned is fun,
The exhibition is fun because the artists included are so inventive. They paint with clay (James Esber), stitch with neon (Norma Markley), sculpt with fabric (Elana Herzog), make purses out of candy and pills (Julie Allen) and write on party dresses (Hunter Reynolds). Besides being inventive, that artists are also, by and large, rather bizarre: they make enormous signs of their own names (Mike Weiss), craft boxy, human sized ducks out of thin plywood (Akiva Boker), create a video of a human butt being tickled by a peacock feather and mount this video in a big black fabric flower (Ray Rapp) and spend a week kissing the wall in different lipstick colors (Rafael Sanchez).

Lee Boroson’s Mirror, 1998 is both bizarre and functional, altering a low gallery wall (below a row of windows) with nylon fabric that billows out in sections, each segment anchored by the existing electrical socket the way that sofa upholstery is held down with buttons.

The exhibition includes several paintings that would probably look weird and inventive in other contexts, but which appear relatively traditional in comparison to the rest of the work around them. The paintings of Bill Doherty, Glen Garver, and Tom McGlynn were included for good reason—the artists deal with textile-like patterns and/or inventive use of paint—but it’s hard to settle down enough to really see their relatively subtle work in this high-voltage setting. It’s like trying to concentrate on a flower when there is a fourth of July fireworks show going on.
One quiet work on paper, Diana Frid’s The Clearing, 1998, manages to lure you in with its delicate detail. Made to resemble a traditional Asian ink painting or calligraphy scroll, the paper-like surface is filled with delicately painted tree stumps each with spindly roots reaching out below it, illustrating a forest of dejected and dying trees.
Other paintings, like Carolanna Parlato’s high-powered blasts of color, Gary Peterson’s tall, oddly shaped canvases and Suzan Batu’s painting with glitter and pompoms, hold their own among the craziness around them just by virtue of being optically charged.

One of my favorite works, a work that seems to rely more on intellectual and emotional fireworks than on visual ones, is Maureen Conner’s Limited Vision, 1991/1992. It consists of a large cube the size of a small room, completely obscured by flowing white curtains. You instinctively look for a doorway, a place to part the curtains to go inside. When you finally find it, you are confronted with the image of yourself in distorted mirror-like mylar. The image first startles, then seduces. You instinctively run your hands through your hair or straighten your clothes, your mood altered. This work gets to the heart of what many artists resisted about fashion all along: it reminds us (as artists as well as individuals) that we’re a part of the world and subject to the same rules as everyone else. Let’s just accept that and get on with things.

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