In his series of self-portraits, “Portraits of a Serialsammler” Brinkmann dons an assortment of old clothing and household items salvaged from the street or from flea markets, sets the self-timer on his camera, and readies his pose, capturing himself in this unusual regalia. While his portraits echo the formal conventions of classical portraiture—carefully arranged and rigidly posed—the bizarre costumes, invariably masking his face, disrupt expectations of the genre.
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© Thorsten Brinkmann
Courtesy Evan Mirapaul
Cao Fei uses the arena of Second Life, a popular online platform where more than a million participants have shed their earthly identities and assumed new ones as avatars, living out their dreams in a fully functioning virtual world. China Tracy, her Second Life identity, is a tall, leggy Chinese woman who wears shiny body armor. RMB City is an island metropolis that Cao (in her China Tracy guise) and a team of young web designers built in Second Life in 2008. In March 2009, Modern Weekly, a popular Chinese lifestyle magazine published out of Guangzhou, commissioned a fashion shoot in RBM City. Clad in fashions by Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, and other vanguard designers, China Tracy posed in various picturesque locations around RBM city. For the Triennial, Cao installed these virtual fashion photographs on billboards throughout RMB City, which exhibition visitors can explore by maneuvering an avatar on the nearby computer.
Commissioned by Modern Weekly magazine, 2009
Fashion shoot in Second Life
© Cao Fei and RMB City, 2009
RMB City Project developed by Cao Fei and Vitamin Creative Space
Facilitator: Uli Sigg
In her provocative Claymation films, Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg constructs sets composed of mundane materials such as cardboard and cloth, while the characters’ costumes are meticulously designed with frequent references to high fashion. “New Movements in Fashion,” presents an array of female stereotypes articulated through frantic outfit changes. The video tracks five supermodel caricatures fervently donning new outfits, resulting in instant personality transformations for each one.
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© Nathalie Djurberg
Courtesy Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, and Gio Marconi, Milan
For more than a decade, Dutch artist Jacqueline Hassink has examined the manner in which fashion and style
serve a financial purpose. In a recent project, “Car Girls,” Hassink explores the exclusive world of car shows that are held every year in major cities such as Frankfurt, Geneva, New York, Paris, and Tokyo. Car girls play a supporting role to the car, humanizing and underscoring its allure, shaping its brand, and intensifying its glamour. Hassink’s video “BMW Car Girls” wryly follows a group of car girls in action at a BMW show in Paris.
Courtesy the artist and Amador Gallery, New York
Using a room-sized camera obscura with a powerful flash Learoyd, creates large-scale portraits for his “Agnes Series.” An early precursor to photography, the camera obscura historically functioned as a perspective drawing aid, employing a small pinhole (later, a lens) to focus light from an exterior scene onto the inside back wall of a darkened space. Learoyd’s apparatus, essentially a walk-in camera, is comprised of two adjacent rooms: one lit, where the subject sits and one completely dark, which holds the photographic paper. Through a lens installed in the wall connecting the two rooms, the images are recorded onto the direct-positive photographic paper without an intermediary negative.
© Richard Learoyd
Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York
Kalup Linzy has entertained viewers with his live performances and a growing body of videos screened in various art-world venues and widely distributed via YouTube. He typically dresses in unconvincing drag to assume the roles of various recurring characters. “SweetBerry Sonnet” is an album of original songs that Linzy wrote and recorded in 2008. In a related suite of music videos, Linzy appears as various members of the Braswell family, each of whom performs songs that somehow match their established personas. By dressing his characters in period clothing and anchoring the plot in affairs of the heart, Linzy invokes the films of Douglas Sirk and other mid-century melodramas that catered to female audiences even as he disrupts that genre’s conventions.
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© Kalup Linzy
Courtesy Taxter & Spengemann, New York
For the series “Undergarments & Armor” Marcuse traveled to costume collections and museums in the U.S. and Europe, photographing historical corsets, bustles, breastplates, and helmets, the mannequins used for their display, and the museum storerooms that house them. Both male armor and female undergarments were used to enhance the body, as much to define and sculpt as to conceal and protect. Here, the forensic presentation of a metal corset shows it to be more of a structural device than an alluring or fetishistic object.
Courtesy the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York
“Community of Elsewheres” is O’Malley’s body of portraits that celebrate marginality and difference. She lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and most of subjects are queer. Her interest in expressions of alternative gender— through clothing, makeup, or body modification— is apparent in the work. Gender distinctions don’t apply in this body of work, she says. She considers herself photographing male and female in the same person.
Cindy Sherman produced a suite of fashion images that appeared in the August 2007 issue of Paris Vogue. Modeling clothes designed by Nicolas Ghesquière for Balenciaga, Sherman assumed the guises of various characters we have come to associate with the world of high fashion. Some of the playful caricatures from the Paris Vogue editorial reappeared in a group of large-scale, multifigure photographs that Sherman produced in the same year. Here she appears twice as the same bespectacled, Balenciaga-clad woman standing in front of a graffiti-covered wall.
Courtesy Metro Pictures
Over the course of her career, Laurie Simmons has used dolls, ventriloquist dummies, found photographs and illustrations to create pictures that nod to a nostalgic doll-house-like innocence as they critique gender stereotypes. In 2005, she purchased a group of miniature stage sets at an antiques fair constructed in the 1940s by Ardis Vinklers, an obscure Latvian artist and set designer. Simmons photographed each of them as empty set pieces with the period décor that Vinklers had evoked using various pieces of painted wood. Here Vinklers stands to one side and observes an array of glamorous paper dolls who strike dramatic poses around the room.
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© Laurie Simmons
Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York
Best known as a painter, Mickalene Thomas channels the looks found in 1970s pop culture, combined with influ-
ences as varied as Henri Matisse’s odalisques and Seydou Keïta’s lushly patterned portraits, to create erotically
charged color photographs of powerful, confident African American women who recall the heroines of blaxpoita-
tion films. Thomas’s models appear in different guises, and the faux wood paneling, animal print rugs, and patterned textiles in her domestic interiors compete for the viewer’s attention. The photographs are contemporary explorations of black womanhood, wherein archetypes from the past are both celebrated and critiqued.
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© Mickalene Thomas
Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York
Yolaçan’s photographs of anonymous women making unusual sartorial statements adhere to certain conventions of portraiture. Far more innovative are the sitters’ costumes, which Yolaçan carefully fashions from the skins, flesh, and entrails of various butchered animals. In 2007, she visited the island of Itaparica off the coast of Brazil, and engaged a number of local Afro-Brazilian women to pose for a series of photographs. Yolaçan designed garments for these women to model. By incorporating generous amounts of cow placenta and other organ meats into these designs, the material confusion between the luscious fabrics and the glistening animal innards is genuinely shocking. Equally confounding are her sitters’ ambiguous expressions, by turns confident, proud, severe, suspicious, or serene.
Courtesy the artist; Collection Helen Harrington Marden, New York
