A Look At Chaos Shows This to be True

A collaboration with Sherry Antonini and Suzanne Cohan-Lange

Little Black Dress is a study in self-expression, fashion, the body, the self and society.  Women, as creatures of hope, seasonally reinvent themselves along the larger timeline of history.  What women wear, how they fashion themselves, is a reflection of many perceived necessities, ranging from the need for life-sustaining protection to the dictates of a current trend. In turn, what women put on can be read as markers and documentation of particular moments in time, signifying both the personal and the political.

 This collaborative project features over 100 sculptures, each in the form of a woman’s torso. They are doll-sized, all black and, at first glance, all the same. But since they are each made of different materials ranging from tree roots to condoms, band-aids to pearls, no two are alike. Flexibility of the supporting rods allow the women to sway back and forth, yet always spring back.

 Original text is printed on the dresses that hang along the walls surrounding the sculptures. These lines of text are excerpted from the installation’s corresponding sound piece, a low-volume stereo mix echoing and adding to the writing on the dresses. Inside these lyrical lines are excerpts of stories-- the temporal and evolving accounts that make up a woman’s life. Wherever that life takes place, there is always a version of war, death or disease and the endless fight to stave it off through various efforts that might include and/or alternate between remaining healthy, righteous, worthy, assured, aware, in denial, uninformed, unwell, overly medicated, and in or out of current fashion.  A chorus of voices is presented: voices that speak alone and voices that speak together in a composition of testimonials, cocktail talk, whispering, laughing, weeping and silence.

 The video component, a large wall projection, provides further perceptions into this complexity of women’s lives, confirming that “it is possible to be telling the truth at the moment of invention” (Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods). Images arise from acts of faith, the magic and folly of multi-tasking, becoming caught in our own net of beliefs, and the power of resiliency.