The collaborative duo Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa imagined architecture as “interactive laboratories of everyday life.” Fueled by a speculative design framework that sought immortality, their collaboration produced spaces which challenge bodily perception in order to “reverse our destinies” and alter consciousness. Their projects ask visitors to approach space with the open-mindedness of children and discover new ways of living in their bodies.
Taking Arakawa + Gins concept of Reversible Destiny as a prompt for an exhibition at Dreamsong, we invited artists to make and present works that play with the limits of everyday functional design and apparel. Cognizant of the influence of our lived environments on our collective consciousness, the exhibition challenges the homogeneity, grayscaling and mass-produced automatizations of the built environment and fast fashion, embracing bold color and labor-intensive craft.
Through abstracting, shifting and re-imagining the details, textures and forms of their everyday lives, the artists in this exhibition explore unexamined cultural values embedded in that which is familiar and even mundane. In mashups that slip between obsolete categorizations of art, design, fashion and craft, we find openness, joy and new lenses through which to see and understand the world and ourselves. Through this experiment, artists reveal the multiplicity of practices that simultaneously exist in their studios. Whether sewing clothes, building furniture or otherwise adorning their bodies and homes, artists often expand their practice into the domestic sphere to create expansive worlds that are meaningful and enlivening. In turn, these tangents turn back towards their art practices as reciprocal elements in ongoing discourses.
Foregrounding the relationship between objects and the body, themes long excavated in the history of feminist art, the artists in the exhibition present ceramic and papier maché vessels, a game of chess, a daybed, a hand-tufted rug, a chair built with accretion of sand, paper pulp, string, and detritus, a quilt covered with drawn marks and cyanotype, sculptures built like sagging woven basketry, abstractions that cull from the overlooked mundane patterns of contemporary life and other works that excavate ancestral material culture.
This exhibition was curated by Rachel Collier and Rebecca Heidenberg.
