Frau Fiber, Knock Off Enterprises

UE Western Regional Council Building

"Frau Fiber, activist and textile worker, will mimic the expenditure of apparel production, reconstructing a white shirt and business suit originally produced offshore. A suit and shirt, the archetypal white-collar uniform, is an American icon, standing for quality, dependability and style, enhancing the wearer’s professional image.

The remade garments will be available for purchase in the storefront, priced on a geographical sliding scale (hours worked to make the reconstructed garment multiplied by the wage scale in the original garment’s country of manufacture—China, Guatemala, Taiwan—equals KO’s cost of the uniform)."

For detailed information on dates and locations, please visit Gallery 400

"Tescos’ White Collar Shirt, purchased for 4.50 euro; KO White Collar Shirt, assembled from recycled fancy dress."

Fashion in Film Festival

Festival Poster starring Irma Vep

If in London, don’t miss the Fashion in Film Festival, now in its second edition. Co-curated by Marketa Uhlirova and Christel Tsilibaris and titled “If Looks Could Kill,” it tackles the links between fashion and crime in cinema--two inextricable themes, as the earliest incarnation of the cinematic woman of fashion—the vamp—perhaps starts to point out.

The festival takes place across the city in a number of different venues and shows an equally diverse range of films, from Dario Argento’s terrifying horror movie The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) to Cindy Shermann’s “darkly humorous flick” Office Killer (1997), and the silent film series by Louis Feuillade Les Vampires (1915) starring Irma Vep—perhaps one of the earliest yet most compelling incarnations of the feminine criminal in film.

The impressive line-up of movies is matched by an equally impressive array of speakers, including the renowned film scholar Tim Gunning and the fashion designer Bella Freud, to name just two.

Francesca

Still from Feuillade's Les Vampires (1915)

International Fiber Collaborative

International Fiber Collaborative, W.R.A.P.

The International Fiber Collaborative just completed their yearly project...The collaborative was started with "the goal to provide an opportunity for people who enjoy working with fiber arts, to come togethe to express their concern about the worlds extreme dependency on oil."

"This year’s project is called the World Reclamation Art Project (W.R.A.P.). Participants have crocheted, knitted, stitched, patched, or collaged 3 foot square fiber panels that expresses each participants concern about this topic. Simply by designing and creating these panels and participating in this project they are, in the larger picture, expressing their concern about this important subject to the rest of the world. All the panels have been sewn together to completely cover an abandoned gas station in central New York State."

Blonde Tresses at the Park Avenue Armory

MK Guth, Ties of Protection and Safekeeping 2007-08.

The Park Avenue Armory portion of the Whitney Biennial just closed this past Sunday. In great part dedicated to the more ephemeral and time-based medium of performance art, it included the work of the Portland artist MK Guth. Previously New York–based and the founder of the Red Shoe Delivery Service (the art collaborative that Fashion Projects interviewed in the first issue), MK Guth contributed an interactive sculpture to the biennial show.

The piece started by asking viewers what they felt was worth protecting. The answers were then written on strips of red flannel and woven into an ever-growing braid made of artificial hair, which the audience braided together with the artist. The day I visited the Armory, the performance had come to a close and the braids draped the dark-lit wood paneled rooms of the Armory, where the performance had taken place. Yet some of the artificial hair was left in an adjacent room together with pieces of red felts—the remnants contributing to the melancholic and morbid feeling conveyed by the braided blonde tresses.

Francesca

Tamy Ben-Tor at Zach Feuer

The Israeli, New York-based, performance artist Tamy Ben-Tor is having her second solo show at the Zach Feuer Gallery in Chelsea. Concomitantly with the exhibition opening, the artist will perform a solo work-in-progress at the Kitchen on the evenings of March 28 and 29.

Titled "Judensau"—a historically-laden anti-semitic image dating back to the Middle Ages—the piece will continue Ben Tor’s exploration of different persona, which in her absurdist performance are meant to represent "embodiments of non-existing entities."

In Ben Tor's own words: "The characters I portray are not real. However they are specific. I don’t speak about politics; I use them to invoke feeling just as I speak in different languages in order to reach a nonsensical outcome. This is because it is only through the specific and descriptive that a tension with the abstract can be formed.”

For more information, visit Zach Feur Gallery and the Kitchen.