SHIFT: Ecologies of Fashion, Form and Textile

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Medrie MacPhee, "Second Thoughts," 2022

oil and mixed media on canvas, 56” x 86”. Courtesy of the artist and Stellar Art.

Opening Reception: September 15, 6:00-8:00PM

SHIFT: Ecologies of Fashion, Form and Textile addresses the intersection of visual art, fashion and textiles, to consider these practices as worldmaking forms of knowledge production, and as a rare form of human encounter that comprises every aspect of daily life. Embracing embodiment and powerfully shaping social, cultural and political gestures and movements, this knowledge ranges from conceptual development and design, to ecological engagements, ceremonial and spiritual purposes, cultural expression and their attendant appropriations, to the animating energy of queer joy in fashion.

Through sculpture, painting, photography, and performative practices, SHIFT reflects on how garments and materials may hold a memory or shape affects, while others tell stories of their makers and their wearers, or the origins of textiles themselves. Whether fibres with long histories of cultural expression and process, or synthetically produced fabrics arising from post-war technologies with enduring and unwelcome afterlives, the question of whose hands, imaginations and lands are affected by this element shape our daily lives.

Within contemporary culture and more recently, over the course of the evolving climate crisis and pandemic, the effects of a globalized fashion industry and its aesthetics led to enquiries about consumerism and cultural appropriation alongside discussions of decolonization and globalization’s impacts and futures. SHIFT considers the ways in which power, colonialism and consumerism are expressed within fashion, both within the lives of individuals and communities, and in the fashion world as a globalized entity.

Including a symposium, residency with Vancouver artist Jaewoo Kang, and works by China Adams, Jason Dodge, Olaf Holzapfel, Brian Jungen, Annette Kelm, Christiane Lohr, Medrie MacPhee, Manuel Mathieu, Meret Oppenheim, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Janet Werner, among others, SHIFT proposes forms for an emancipating futurity, where fashion, ecology and community converge.