“UNCOVERING Fashion” creates art from textile waste and raises questions
In collaboration with the “Uncovering Fashion” exhibit at The Gallery at Main Street Station, closing Oct. 30, the Cabell Screen presents a digital exhibit of some of this work.
What relationships do we have with the clothes we wear? What is the relationship between the clothes we wear and the planet on which we live? What is our connection to the people whose hands make our clothing? What happens to our clothes once we discard them? Who pays the price for overproduction and overconsumption?
“UNCOVERING Fashion” features pieces created as part of a collaborative project that considers these questions in the context of the global textile waste crisis.
The work in the exhibition came from curator Kimberly Guthrie’s invitation to VCU School of the Arts fashion designers, researchers and educators to work with 665 pounds of discarded garments from donations collected in depositories situated throughout Richmond. The artists then created pieces that reflect their concerns surrounding textile waste.
- Using different shades and qualities of denim, Kevin Sellars uses a metaphorical visual vocabulary to explore themes of impotence and entanglement.
- Prompting viewers to reconsider the perception of “waste”, Cate Latham uses layering and preservation as instruments that record human behavior, corporate influence, and recent history.
- Textile waste and sustainability are addressed by Hawa Stwodah through a linkage to notions of protection and adaptation inherent to cultural identity and migration.
- Kimberly Guthrie’s piece centers on themes of grief through disassembly and reassembly, using repair as a symbol of restoration, worth, and connection.
- The piece created by Michael-Birch Pierce focuses on ritual, care, and transformation, using recovery and embellishment as a path toward the visibility and remembrance of textile workers and their communities.
A short film exploring layered meanings, place, and agency is at the center of Jeannine Diego’s piece, through which she explores the intertwining of selfhood and compulsive consumption.
The exhibition invites the viewer to consider how practices of consumption, waste, repair and cultural identity shape our collective relationship to fashion.
This exhibition was curated by Kimberly Guthrie and made possible with the support of VCUarts and the VCU Arts Dean’s Research Grant.
Categories Fashion, School of the Arts