Is the gape-inducing artist Kara Walker starting a fashion trend?
We're still reeling from her terrific, terrifying exhibit at The Whitney, a show that employs her trademark silhouettes to build a mythical land, where race and class clash in crass, horrifying, and really beautiful ways.
Walker's silhouette aesthetic is taken from the antebellum parlors of the South, where shadows and face shapes were drawn by candlelight and framed, and said to hold the key to people's personality, intelligence, and worth.
And now Ann Demeulemeester has taken it from Kara, making little badges that mimic her shapes and style, but without the sharp racial subtext.
It's not just using the silhouette, a technique that Alex & Chloe successfully mastered with accessories several years ago.
It's the way Ann's characters inhabit a fantasy world, and the way her buttons "have illustrations of mystical creatures. Pin them everywhere, and take yourself off to a different land."
Or you could just go here and explore Ms. Walker's own "mystical creatures."
They're less comfortable than Ann's, but probably more exciting.
posted by beaver_city
Nov 21, 2007 1:08PM
is it a good thing for kara walker's ambiguously discomforting silhouettes to be recuperated into commercial objects in the form of accessories? i'm not sure it's good for the art but the buttons sure are adorable.
this is almost exactly what happened to bridget riley after she exhibited a few of her black and white "psychedelic" paintings at MOMA's 1965 "responsive eye" show. her paintings easily translated into textiles, and came to embody "mod" sixties style. Riley has stated in many interviews how she resented this commercialization of her work and felt that it compromised her craft.