by Emily Wilson
–USA–
I admire boldness. So Katrina Rodabaugh’s The Dresses / Objects Project, a multi-disciplinary installation combining a dizzying array of artistic forms appealed to me. Through poetry, dance, fashion, photography and letterpress, Rodabaugh embraces a broad swath of disciplines and takes on a wide range of ideas. She uses women’s clothing to explore gender and femininity, the line between art and what is generally considered women’s crafts, and how context affects the way we view things.
Rodabaugh’s The Dresses / Objects Project was inspired by Gertrude Stein’s book of experimental poetry, Tender Buttons, published in 1914. Rodabaugh, a poet and an artist, loves the way Stein played with language, focusing on the sound of the words. She finds poems like A Petticoat modern and moving almost 100 years later:
A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.
“It was super groundbreaking and experimental at the time,” Rodabaugh said of the book of short poems, many of them about women’s clothing. “I was struck at how relevant her work still is to contemporary poets.” Rodabaugh knew she wanted to start the project with poetry. “Because I’m a poet and a visual artist, I wanted to combine them. I’ve been interested in poetry and book arts since I was a little girl.”
Rodabaugh printed lines from Stein’s poetry on recycled fabric with a letterpress traditionally used for paper. She then sent the fabric to ten designers from different disciplines – printmakers, graphic artists, and furniture designers. She wanted women, some of whom had never created a garment before, to try using a needle and thread. She asked them to make a dress or something wearable using the fabric and to come up with something that looks like it belonged to Stein’s era.
Choreographer Erin Mei Ling Stuart liked the idea of artists creating in an unfamiliar form. “There are a lot of unknowns that puts everyone a little outside of their comfort zone,” she said. “That means potential for interesting things to happen.”
As a viewer, seeing what the artists have come up with is interesting. Perhaps the artists felt freer, more playful, working with a different medium. Some designers brought their own talents to the dresses such as the printmaker who used ink spots or the furniture designer who put wooden buttons on her dress.
Alison McLennan said she had never really made anything to wear before except a Halloween costume. She says she tried to make something androgynous, which she thought seemed fitting for the poet. “I came up with a design that I thought Gertrude Stein might wear,” she said. “A man’s vest on the top and a pleated skirt.”
Trying something new was enjoyable for McLennan, and she felt honored to be part of the project. “It was a neat idea using so many different processes and to have all different people collaborating,” she said. “I liked the way [Rodabaugh] took poems about dresses and fabric and femininity, and made something out of it. It was definitely fun.”
After Rodabaugh got the dresses back from the designers she set up a fashion shoot with different artists as models. She then created an installation at Z Space at Theater Artaud in San Francisco that exhibits through July 18th.
Rodabaugh sees the dress as an iconic symbol of femininity. Showing the dresses so many different ways means changing how they are seen. “They go from being an art object, to a fashion garment, to costume,” she said. “As the context changes, the viewers’ relationship changes. Context is so significant.”
Playing with context also intrigues Stuart. “The ideas about the transformation of objects was interesting,” she said. “The dresses go from something untouchable to being presented as a costume to something you could buy and wear, so the same object goes through different functions.”
This transformation of objects and the blurring of boundaries is my favorite part of the exhibit. By putting the dresses on the wall, on dancers’ bodies, in photos as fashion, Rodabaugh changes the way we look at things – waking us up a little, making us question how we see things, and inspiring us to look more carefully.
Walking through the exhibit, I think about a conversation I overheard. The people were talking about objects and meaning and they were debating if a book being used to pound a nail becomes a hammer. I like having a chance to think about whether a dress hanging on a wall is still a dress, or has it transformed into art? Does photographing someone in a pose we can all recognize from glossy magazines make it stylish? Looking at the assumptions we make about dresses and fashion, I end up questioning bigger issues such as our assumptions about gender and femininity.
Katrina Rodabaugh’s inspiration for the The Dresses/Object Project was poetry. While viewing the installation I realize that, as with any poem, there are multiple interpretations and no one right answer.
About the Author:
Emily Wilson is a native Californian, living in San Francisco. She studied journalism at Columbia Univeristy, and has written for a variety of radio, print and online outlets, including Latino USA, KQED, NPR, KCBS, KALW, Agence France-Presse, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The East Bay Express, Alternet, Diverse Magazine and Edutopia. Along with writing, Emily teaches at City College of San Francisco.
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