Queer Fashion Art Show

This event (the opening reception) should be interesting and fun. It's a sounds like an odd and interesting collection of artwork totally worth going down to the archives to see.

WEAR ME OUT: Queering Fashion, Art and Design
an exhibit honoring what we've fought to wear

November 5, 2005 to January 29, 2006
at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives
909 West Adams Blvd., LA CA 92007
www.oneinstitute.org
213-741-0094

Opening reception 7pm, November 5, 2005.
with DJ Emancipation and members of the Black Artists Collective


Los, Angeles, CA, September 23, 2005--"WEAR ME OUT: Honoring what we've fought to wear" puts textiles and clothing at the forefront of an exhibit on the subject of "reading fashion." Bringing together 30 queer visual artists and fashion designers, curator Tania Hammidi aims to "take the shame out of fashion and situate how aesthetics, gay/lesbian/trans memory, and utility have historically converged on our bodies.”



The show busts seams in its exploration of aesthetics, narrative, and cultural memory wedded to orafactory perception and tactile exchange. Emily Roysdon explores gesture in her "Gay Power" jumpsuit installation while Heather Cox brings out gestural and patterned repetition in "Shirt Quilt.” Privacy and monumentality meet in a dynamic series of bronze panties, "Porn Stars and Academics," by Elizabeth Stephens. And while "Visible Difference" by Lenore Chinn appears aesthetically balanced, it's message is much bolder. New work from Emile Devereaux, "Wormhole #3," provides a sonic interactive piece on recogniction while Mitzy Velez explores the artist's own emergence as a lipstick-donning gay woman confronting normative standards of beauty.

Worn by Le Tigre's JD Samson is "Totally Soft" a t-shirt articulating a vocabulary of sentiment, bravery, and comfort through physical wear and tear. Chitra Ganesh dons resistance through Hindu mythology and constructed Indo-Persian armor in "The Awakening." The cover painting "Last Time I Wore A Dress" by author Dylan Scholinski suggests that scale communicates his own experiences of psychiatric incarceration and regulated dress, while drag coiture of performance artist Shelly Mars evidences the 1990's historical shift in queer/lesbian focus on female masculinity and lesbian rites of passage. Queer fashion photography from K8 Hardy, Cass Bird and Sarah Baley are far ahead of the fashion industry. "Blue Things I Wear" by Jessica Lawless honors genderqueer sensibility while confronting heteronormative gallery phobias.

Designers Parisa Parnian (Rigged OUT/Fitters, NYC), Hushi and Micheal (LA), Bre Cole + Aisha Pew (Chocolate Baby Designs, Oakland) and Gayngsta (LA) approach design, the body, and queer cultural memory in widly divergent manners. Designer Parisa Parinan's "queering" of vintage menswear addresses desire and the problems of a global fashion labor force head on, while Micheal and Hushi bring Iranian identity and gay sexual desire together on one muscle T.

19th century African Amerian "Quilts of Suits," the lost shoe of Mayor Frank Jordan (on loan from SF Gay Lesbian, Bisexual, TransgenderHistorical Society), and G.B. Jones' "Bitch Nation" T round out the archival corners of the exhibit.

Whether celebrating the everyday or unfolding the repressed, these bold artists enact the subversive practices of reading fashion – and show us that we speak and remember through clothing.