The ART of FASHION
FALL TRENDS GALA GOING 101 TOP SHOPS
PLUS: INSIDE THE WARDROBES OF THE CITY’S MOST STYLISH PEOPLE
WHERE DO THE WORLDS OF ART AND FASHION MEET? IF ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE, THEN OUR CLOTHING CHOICES ARE PROPS WE USE TO SHAPE OUR IDENTITY. FOR THOSE WHO APPRECIATE THE CRAFT OF CREATING CLOTHING AND JEWELLERY, A SUIT MAY BE A WORK OF ART; A STATEMENT NECKLACE COULD BE COMPARED TO A SCULPTURE (WITH THE ADDED BENEFIT OF PORTABILITY). FOR ARTISTS WHO SPEND THEIR DAYS RUMINATING ON COLOUR, TEXTURE, AND PROCESS
— NEVER MIND WHAT THESE DECISIONS CONVEY ABOUT THEIR WORK — FASHION CAN BE A POWERFUL TOOL. HERE, CINDY DEACHMAN TALKS TO THREE OTTAWA ARTISTS ABOUT THE INTERSECTIONS OF THEIR PERSONAL STYLE AND THEIR ARTWORK.
PUNK AND PROVOCATION Is artist Lilly Koltun an eccentric? The dramatic magenta stripe through her hair might give it away. Koltun grins. “People are primed. I can say anything.” She has borrowed from punk, but as provocateur rather than nihilist. Her art, she says, is “built out of a personal anger I feel about injustice.” Her recent work retells historical tales of violence and humanity.
For example, it is claimed that in 1908 Lazarus Averbuch entered George M. Shippy’s house bearing a gun and a knife. No wonder Chicago police chief Shippy, along with his chauffeur, fired seven bullets to finish him off. But all that was discovered on Averbuch, an 18-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant, was an envelope containing a blank sheet of paper. Averbuch’s sister said he simply wanted to move to Iowa. Apparently in Russia, in those days, you first had to obtain a signed letter from the police chief. Needless to say, at the Averbuch trial, both Shippy and his driver were let off the hook.
More than a century later, Koltun uses newspaper photos from the case in her series The Lazarus Incident, Chicago, 1908. One panel, Police Captain Evans Steadies Lazarus’ Corpse for the Press — Full Face, shows Averbuch in a chair, his pants fallen down, his backside embarrassingly exposed. At the time, many Americans were revolting against the syndicates, considering them economic terrorists. Paranoid feelings ran high. Here was proof. Here was Lazarus Averbuch shown as anarchist and communist.
Koltun tells these stories to explore how we’ve “become enmeshed in the culture of violence.” Is cruelty merely a trap into which we innocents fall, or does such barbarism originate from each one of us? Through this series, she investigates “important human questions” — questions of our own civility.
For someone who is so serious about her art, Koltun has radical fun with her wardrobe. See that pair of yellow chunky platform shoes? Clipped onto the shoe on the left is a 1950s brooch found in a thrift shop; on the right is another, once owned by her mother. Her wardrobe is an archive of sorts. “Over the last 40-odd years, I’ve kept all my clothes.” Here’s her red tartan skirt and giant-shouldered ’80s jacket; there’s her knit mini-dress in chartreuse alongside the fine silk dresses she sewed for herself. Eccentric? In a word, yes.