Thursday, April 26, 2012

A fine blend of fashion and contemporary art

Fashion and Art are akin to warp & weft, intertwined naturally and seamlessly into each other. And a new breed of talented, young contemporary practitioners is now keen to create a visual idiom for abstract narratives with motifs drawn from the domain of popular fashion. It’s a beautiful blend of two overlapping skills.

There are artists whose background in architecture of fashion helps them. For them, it’s a fine blend of two diverse albeit harmonious streams that meet at multiple points. For instance, a textile designer-turned artist from Pakistan Faseeh Salim makes use of textiles, knits, embroidery, mannequins and fibers as mediums to create installations that resemble fashionable object on the surface but actually are art works with a much deeper meaning to them on the canvas.

The artist terms them ‘journeys in pure self-expression’ with an acute social, cultural and political message. The Lahore-based artist was recently in India as part of a residency program.

He knits bewildering body-like sculptures with mystical matex fiber that gets shrunk when it’s exposed to heat along with steel fiber. The sculptures knitted on knitting machines are molded to suggest the ‘fluid body statistics in the realm of fashion and its close relation with clothes, which have to fit.

Kolkata-based Paula Sengupta often reverts to the days of Bengal partition to blend them with deft elements of both fashion and textiles in her visual narratives. The varied skills of installation art and traditional fashion drawings also meet in Archana Hande's ‘Copy Master ji’.

It’s a new mixed media work that shows how she often utilizes textile printing technology on mediums such as wood blocks for transforming conventional art practice into innovative and decorative designs, which comment on urbanization and globalization. For her everything can be art. Even though art and fashion are distinctly different mediums, they both express an inner urge to create.

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