Clothes Make All of Us: “Garb” Exhibit at ArtCenter

ART EXHIBIT

(L-R) Sha Sha Higby’s Glass Jungle, Obama 2008 by Lisa Anne Auerbach (Photos – Garrett Rowlan)

The Garb in the Williamson Gallery at ArtCenter College of Design, is an eclectic exhibit which projects ideas in two and three dimensions in forms ranging from wall hung presentations to objects floating in space.

By Garrett Rowlan

The exhibit plays with space, and it also plays with time. The reprints of Edith Head’s costume design for Elizabeth Taylor’s gown in the 1951 movie A Place in The Sun, Bob Peak’s poster illustration of the 1964 film My Fair Lady, with Audrey Hepburn  in fully finery, Stan Winston’s shell-like design for the “Alien” get-up, all the way to Lisa Anne Auerbach’s Obama, 2008, where the former President’s name is written on a St Patrick’s Day sweater, all suggest an historical perspective.

The highlights of the exhibit for me were two of Sha Sha Higby’s costumes: the winged exoskeleton called Glass Jungle and the imposing In Folds of Tea. Both, for all their daunting height, have a faint lightness of touch reminiscent of the late German-both, American artist Eva Hesse. Sha Sha Higby will be at ArtCenter on March 14 to “model” her creation.

“Clothes make the man,” runs the old saying, yet walking around the exhibit one feels that it’s a culturally-exhausted trope when the thrust of the exhibition seems to say that clothes are a means of making many things: alternative body images, walking manifestos, extensions of personality. The subtitle of the heading—“The Collision of Image, Body, Art, Object, Fashion, and Costume”—seems to reinforce this. Furthermore, three-fourths of the artists listed on the exhibit’s roll call are women.

Clothes make all of us. The costumes are hung like dressing room props. Maybe they wait for us to make them whole, to help them manifest some inner destiny.

The exhibits runs until June 8.