Shirts All The Way Down

shirts all the way down

Art, not as a means for representing the body but rather, as decorum for the body itself

The most seemingly inconspicuous clothing item sends a message about the body in relation to its position within a larger societal structure in terms of gender, race, class, etc. Art is a means for one to render the seemingly rigid building blocks of that structure malleable. Screen printing, in particular, is characteristic of this type of play with structure; of the tension between rigidity and fluidity. The mesh screen is a filter, the stencil atop of which is applied in liquid form and selectively hardened via exposure to ultraviolet light for the controlled depositing of fluid medium.

In short, the screen is like a net or a filter controlling what passes through and what gets trapped. As such every mark put down is a record of a hole in the structure. The turtle embodies many of these same characteristics. The shell is rigid and exposed, strengthened by ultraviolet radiation, while the parts of the turtle that can be concealed are (like the areas of the screen selectively blocked off from the light) animate.

This tension between fluidity and structure is exemplified in the narrative of my fashion line which is more than just a fable with the moral: berries are not good for tortoises. It is a story of a nation of turtles reconstructing after their kingdom is literally liquefied due to the choice of their ruler- a worm named King Turtletongue- who, despite warnings of the berries’ corrosive effect on the stone of their turtle-shaped castle, fills the kingdom with the mythic Deathberry. Fluidity is also embodied in the recurring Phantom Turtles: turtle spirits who manifest only in non-solid forms to combat the threats of the Deathberry-ridden regime post-kingdom-meltdown.

The narrative highlights the potential of a fluid approach for both constructing and combating unjust systems of power when power is secured through assertions of concreteness. Like the process of reclaiming a screen, whereby a solution is applied for the dissolution of an otherwise insoluble stencil so as to make the screen new again, creating a more welcoming world requires one to see the existing structure as non-eternal; something that can be changed to make room for something new.