When I first met Pooneh Maghazehe, she was branding slabs of meat, tortillas, and anything else people volunteered (mostly boots and T-shirts) with complex Islamic star-shaped patterns. Then she started making these amazing dresses for performers to wear during rituals she would orchestrate in museum spaces while wearing a hot pink hair suit also of her own design. The costumes she created began with the plain forms of traditional Mennonite or Quaker dresses that she would then embellish with intricate embroidery, beading, tassels, animal skins, transforming the unadorned garments into vestments that you could imagine on a priestess with a patchwork of different beliefs and various cultures, performing her elaborate ceremony.
Pooneh just received her MFA from Columbia where she expanded on this work, incorporating tools into the dresses, and photographing people wearing them in the stark, almost other-worldly, Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah. Her latest work has involved Sisyphean performances wherein she has simultaneously climbed and wallpapered a crude structure she constructed in a gallery space, and most recently, a collaboration with her fiance/musician Skye Steele at the Central Utah Art Center where their indoor leek and potato grow house touched on ideas of communal agriculture and current/historical architecture. Now she’s about to move to Germany for a three month residency where she will be working in the key of "globalization and its impact on the art market since 1989." Girl's keepin' bizz-ay. See more for yourself at her website poonehspeaks.com.
Alexander McQueen was a brilliant British fashion designer who committed suicide last year at the age of 40. Despite the fact that his life was cut short far too soon, he managed to produce a vast amount of incredible work, and after his death, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum immediately set about organizing a retrospective of his oeuvre. According to the New York Times, by the time it closes on August 7th (after having been extended twice), the exhibition is expected to set attendance records and will be among the 20 most popular shows ever held at the museum. Because of the crushing crowds, the Met has also decided it will stay open until midnight on the last two days of the exhibition to accommodate last minute viewers, something they have never done in the history of the museum. Pretty impressive, huh?
So last Friday, after receiving the wonderful and unexpected gift of an afternoon off because of the heat crisis plaguing the city, my coworker and I decided to head uptown to check out the Alexander McQueen show. I heard the wait to get in was over 2 hours long, something I was not looking forward to, but totally willing to put up with. Surely 1 o'clock on a Friday afternoon wouldn’t be so bad though, right?
The museum was mobbed, and immediately upon entering the building, I accidentally separate from my coworker. Ten (near frantic) minutes later he appears with two tickets and says he bought a membership so we were allowed to skip to the head of the line. It seemed too good to be true! We made our way up the grand staircase and followed the looooooong winding row of wait-ers in and out of the museum’s halls. Once we finally found the front of the queue, JP flashed his member’s only receipt and we were ushered right past the velvet rope.
First, there was the ombre-dyed ostrich feather dress with a bodice made of microscope glass plates that were colored blood red. Along with McQueen’s fascination of juxtaposing various textures and materials, an interesting interplay of hard and soft, I found a shared affinity in his appreciation of the dark and macabre.
Back in the day, the spray paint dress was really the one that first inspired me.
The video of the dress being made was on view in this amazing charred cabinet of curiosities room. As soon as I got home, I tracked down as many of his runway shows on Youtube as I could. Every one of them was more like highly orchestrated performance art than some tired old parade of dresses.
Then there was the dress with mud on the hem. The dried muck curled, unfurled away from the fabric of the skirt, looking like growths of moss or bracken lifting off the fabric, tendrils reaching out into space. Of course the top of the dress was also very striking, intricately beaded and draped, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the grit.
And my favorite favorite, the razor clam shell dress. It looked like a beautiful bunch of long, white Lee Press On Nails.
