Fashion exhibition now open at the Momentary

Wendy Red Star

A new group show is now open at the Momentary that explores the cultural implications of fashion and how we shape our identities by the garments we purchase, wear and dispose of.

In Some Form or Fashion” opened Saturday, and will run through March 27, 2022. The exhibit is free and open to the public.

The exhibit explores the many ways clothing can assert our own individuality, which is something that runs parallel to what the Momentary has been doing since it opened, said Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas, curator of the show.

“By inviting these six artists to respond to our architecture, we’re expanding the possibilities of how to embrace our building and its embedded history as a site of mass production and labor,” Garcia-Maestas said.

Each artist will create a large-scale installation for the show using clothing to map real and imagined cultural histories of fashion. The artists have been tasked with embracing the architecture of the Momentary while exploring the intersection of art and fashion.

Here’s more on the artists from the Momentary:

Pia Camil, whose immersive curtains chart the cycles of global consumerism by incorporating secondhand t-shirts that were manufactured in Latin America, discarded in the US, and later, re-sold in open-air markets in Mexico and Latin America;

Martine Gutierrez, whose work subverts imagery from fashion, film, and advertising, referencing the consumer industries’ visual languages, interrogating pop culture’s definitions of identity and its social construction;

Eric N. Mack, whose immersive installations comprised of found clothing and textiles challenge how to perceive value and identity in materials based on setting or context;

Troy Michie, who draws inspiration from men’s fashion, namely the zoot suit, revealing the ways self-fashioning can both advertise and disguise aspects of race, class, and gender;

Simphiwe Ndzube, whose magical realist paintings, drawings, and sculptures form dynamic cosmologies that offer new possibilities for being and becoming in post-apartheid South Africa; and

Wendy Red Star, whose multidisciplinary practice sources inspiration from personal memory, Indigenous ideologies, and historical archives to re-examine colonial structures.

For more information, visit themomentary.org.