Gingham style: Cheryl Donegan turns garments and patterns into art
Abevy of mannequins wearing custom outfits stands at the center of Cheryl Donegan’s solo show “GRLZ + VEILS” at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. But don’t think of them as fashion.
“I resist that professionalization that if I work with garments, I’m a fashion designer,” Donegan says. “People try to define you in order to limit you.”
Nor does she consider these works sculpture in the vein of Joseph Beuys’ flannel suits. “I don’t want to be precious about it,” she said. She calls them “garment as medium.”
A conceptual artist who has adopted domestic goods and tools to create avant-garde paintings and video for several decades, Donegan is exploring how modern art concepts about “readymades” relate to 21st-century relationships with the digital world.
The show also incorporates early-career performance videos; paintings and banners employing Donegan’s signature gingham imagery and a newer track-suit motif; and paintings on cotton fabric printed from her own photographs that have been dyed with a mix of traditional, batik-inspired techniques and brushwork.
It’s partly about exploring how patterns are “spatial concepts” in art.
“Gingham is a humble, homely fabric associated with curtains, tables and everyday clothing but is also a virtual situation. The horizontal and vertical overlap, you get a sense of density — the half-tone and the full-tone — a shallow space of overlapping is implied,” Donegan said. “That space is very evocative to me — it’s the space of the digital, the space of our phones between what the screen shows us and how intimate we are with it.
“So often when English speakers say something is ‘skin deep,’ it’s a putdown. But you can get lost in ‘skin deepness.’ It’s a dimension. Especially in our screen culture — that shallow depth of the phone is something we’re incredibly intimate with, and it defines a lot of contemporary experience.”
Lost in junk space
As an abstract painter working in the 21st century, she’s highly attuned to last century’s compositional methods, including Greenburgian flatness, the Minimalist grid and Cubist hinging — and trying to get beyond them.
“What would a depiction of 21st-century space look like? she said. “The architect Rem Koolhaus describes it best; his term for it is ‘junk space.’ He talks about the grandiose and the pathetic, constantly yoked together in our shopping malls, in our stretch limousines, these vast temples of consumerism that are enabled by air conditioning and elevators … extending spaces far outside the human body or any platonic or spiritual ideals that informed architecture earlier.”
She has played with images of track suits lately because they turn the body into junk space, she said. “They turn the body into the product for somebody else. The track suit cuts the body up into quadrants of muscle or a patchwork of parts.”
Donegan’s garment-asmedium works are not track suits. Some are made from silk slip dresses that began as print-on-demand clothing that she ordered from Print All Over Me , a consumer-friendly company that allows users to upload images and apply them to an array of readymade garments. The print is blown up from photographs she takes of street-level air-conditioning units in New York City that have been damaged by “scratch-iti” — graffiti that bends the metal grills.
“Artists have worked with readymades since the beginning of the modern period,” Donegan said. She puts her on mark on the garments, upcycling some of them into unique garments by dyeing, cutting and fringing them.
She also referenced Jasper Johns’ famous advice, “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.”
“He might not have been talking about jeans, but coming from being a young punk in art school, do-it-yourself is always appealing to me,” she said. “I’m combining do-ityourself with digital. We’re constantly surrounded by the digital, yet there’s such a joy and pleasure in making things by hand.”
Wearable art
Several Houston artists also are using print-ondemand techniques to create fabrics for wearables. Thedra Cullar-Ledford sells a line of sophisticated, colorful dresses, tunics and accessories through Heidi Vaughn Fine Art based on imagery from her paintings — many of which depict clothes, so there’s an echoey thing going on. Abstract artist Preston Douglas, who initially aspired to be a designer, creates wild wearables that are sort of aggressively not for everyone.
“Artists have been doing this forever,” Donegan said. “Warhol silkscreened imagery onto dresses. Sonya Delauney in the beginning of the 20th century was doing fashions for flappers and was also an amazing painter. If you look for that tradition, it’s available. Where precedents can be found, I’m all about bringing them forward.”
Some of her wearables are for sale in the CAMH’s gift shop, priced from about $50 for T-shirts to $400 for customized dresses. And if someone likes the idea enough to try it themselves, great, Donegan said. “I’m not claiming ownership. I wouldn’t be making clothing unless I could buy and alter them … I learned to do it by looking on YouTube.”
She was wearing a black-and-white print blouse — not handmade. “This is just regular ol’ shopping,” she said. “Who doesn’t love a floral blouse, right?”