Thierry Mugler: Couturissime Repost

 Thierry Mugler: Couturissime

The Brooklyn Museum opted to showcase the work of the renowned French fashion designer, Thierry Mugler’s work under the name Couturissme, an invented superlative meaning “beyond couture”. Following Mugler’s recent death in 2022, the legacy of one of the most esteemed designers of the 20th century sets a high bar for representing the “couturissme” of his work. To accomplish this, the Museum utilized alluring interior, light, and sound design to envelope visitors in a world that mirrored and enhanced some of the most influential garments in recent fashion history. Likewise, the garments’ placement in the center of the room allowed one to view the couture works from all angles. The use of dynamically posed mannequins made the garments feel as though they were worn by actual models rather than plastic. 

Visitors of Couturissme are first presented with a holographic video set in a church-like setting. A model dances as her garment transforms into a couture Mugler while the table setting behind her becomes a similarly unexpected gown. This entrance references Mugler’s past runway shows while setting the mood of the exhibit as a modern retrospective. Following this theatrical beginning, the exhibit continues chronologically with the clearly articulated phases of Mugler’s evolution. Couturissime not only represents, but constructs, a metamorphous experience while showcasing Thierry Mugler’s most iconic works.

"Future Presidents" - Amy Hill

Amy Hill’s Future Presidents (2022) show at Fortnight Institute presents a uniquely and subtly surrealist take on realism. Her work aims to update artistic principles traditionally adherent to early American folk art and Renaissance tradition, with this show in particular aiming to reimagine the latter through secularization. She creates scenes that place “everyday” consumer goods in place of religious symbols, and therefore highlights this idea of a new cultural “rebirth” through consumerism and technology, while calling that into question and critique.  

However, perhaps the most compelling aspect of this show is the viewer experience. “Hyper-normal” settings are displayed in a stylistically stiff and awkward manner. Characters do not acknowledge each other as part of their environment, as all are either looking down, away, or directly at the viewer. Though they seem to be existing within their presented setting, they do appear to exhibit awareness of their true role and form as subjects of a painting; their behavior almost feels cognizant of the fact that they have been created to be captured, as they all appear intentionally “paused” rather than candid, and now know that they are now on display for public view. Therefore, rather than presenting a natural setting or interaction between characters, Amy Hill positions the viewer as a subject, potentially eliciting uncomfortability, as if they have walked in on or disturbed a situation. This, when interpreted through the show’s intended lens, successfully adds to the flatness and monotony of this highly commodified, yet true-to-life, culture being presented and brought upon by consumer capitalism. 

- Heather Ortiz

Amy Hill, "Future Presidents" at Fortnight Institute

   The inheritance of stylized representation is the central focus in Amy Hill's Future Presidents (2022) at Fortnight Institute. The exhibition shows 10 works in oil on canvas, ranging from about 2’x2’ to 3’x4’.  The contemporary world is mediated through a glazed lens where distant cityscapes are flattened and graphic, and figures’ bulging features peer blankly in the direction of the viewer, borrowing in part from the tradition of classic painted portraiture from both the European Renaissance and American Folk Art. By evoking the painting movements of seemingly bygone eras, as in Family Breakfast (2022), the attitudes of the past linger in the contemporary. A father, mother and child are shown with flowing hair and heavy eyelids, pouring over a bounty of processed and branded food. 

    This mode of portraiture has connotations with christianity and the pastoral, which is replaced with a secular, consumerist, urban lifestyle. The baby’s gaze meets the viewers’, as does one figure in almost every work in the show. Each figure who meets our gaze has an abundance to display— Sachs shopping bags, a pearl necklace, the luxury of a zoom call with a view, or a golden revolving apartment door. Western portraiture’s enduring obsession with displaying wealth is shown to continue here, without the facade of religion, as Hill subverts the romanticization of earlier periods in art history. Compressing time through styles of painting shows the continuing dissonance of the upper class, and asks if the future presidents will continue to be raised by historical precedents of American expansion and wealth. 

-Madeline McQuillan 

When I Am Empty Please Dispose of Me Properly at BRIC House

BRIC House’s group exhibition, When I Am Empty Please Dispose of Me Properly, examines the ways in which our own humanity, vulnerability, agency, and desires are molded by American capitalist ideals. Featuring the work of seven artists and housed in BRIC’s main gallery space, this exhibition consists of photography based work which draws upon the aesthetics of Americana and uses the language of advertising. Curator Jenny Gerow, with the help of Artist Tahir Carl Karmali and Intern Augusta Weiss, was able to dynamically use the space with four installation pieces alongside four series of photographs.
        The show’s namesake piece by photographer Chuck Ramirez is a photograph of a Whataburger soda cup with the cup’s disposal instructions composed to nearly eye level, thus becoming not only an acknowledgement of a shared consumer motif but also a tender personal note. Ayanna Dozier’s piece, Forever Your Girl, featuring her film of a Black femme riding a miniature carousel, which explores notions of innocence and agency, is a particularly engaging video installation as it incorporates multiple viewing apparatuses. While the hanging photographs’ two-dimensional nature engages with the viewer face-to-face, the installation pieces call the viewer to notice their own physical relationship to the work, body-to-body. In a post-pandemic hyper-capitalist society, When I Am Empty successfully positions viewers to see their own reflection and examine the climate crisis in the collective narrative of these pieces.

- Cornelia Sullivan

Oscar yi Hou : East of sun, west of moon

This exhibit in the Brooklyn Museum features eleven portraits that revolve around Hou’s Queer Asian Cowboy identity using North American and Asian iconography. The exhibit’s title is taken from a poem Oscar wrote “poem pictures”, a hybrid of Chinese and English script with American graffiti, to explore the Asian American experience. Even-One of the pieces “Ends of Empire” features a poem hidden in the red stripes of the US flag that comments on imperialism.

Oscar sneaks in US history by the way of the pieces’ subjects and titles. His “Cooliism” series employs the slur which was against indentured servants of Chinese or Indian decent in the 18th century. Yi Hou uses the word to point out the Asian American violence happening today and reclaiming it for his work by depicting Queer Asian Cowboys . Another work that looks back at Asian American history is “Gold Mountain Cruiser” which depicts a portrait of Yi Hou with a white tank top, jeans, a construction hat, and a pickaxe referring to the history of Asian Americans and the Gold Rush. During this time, many immigrated from China to California hoping to live a better life and, instead, ended up in mining camps. This show uses “poem pictures” to show both US history and queer representation of Asians.

-Vivian Roberts

Jimmy DeSana at the Brooklyn Museum

 Jimmy DeSana: Submission is a long overdue look at the life's work of a prolific and significant figure in photography, LGBTQ history and New York City. The exhibition follows the work of DeSana in three parts, his early work in Atlanta, Georgia, his voice in the punk and alternative subculture of New York in the 1980’s, and lastly his final body of work, dealing with death and facing the AIDS crisis. Many of the photographs involve contorting and condensing the figure into twisted, unnatural poses, and the figures are often nude or semi nude. These uncomfortable, sexy, tension filled photos are what shine the most in the exhibition and come to define DeSana in the years to come.

     In the work, Refrigerator, DeSana has posed a woman inside a refrigerator, she is bound at the wrists and ankles and is in lingerie. Her face is obscured by her hair and between her leg and stomach rest two eggs. The door of the refrigerator also is lined with eggs. This image has such a high tension, between the fragile nature of the egg and the nature of the pose of the model. DeSana’s use of sexual tension, and pushing the body to its limit runs across this center gallery body of work, featuring a red room. This room plays with the idea of a dark room used to expose photos and the sexual connotation to a room lit with red light. The exhibition had such a strong layout for the first two parts and lost steam for the last part. The space was awkward and didn't quite work to end strongly with DeSanas final body of work.

-Chance Al-Hajji

DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash by Duke Riley (Brooklyn Museum)

Duke Riley’s DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash, on display in the Brooklyn Museum, is the culmination of years of collecting, researching, and creating. The exhibition consists of a collection of scrimshaws, sailor’s valentines, fishing lures, and more. Each of these “maritime crafts” are reinterpreted by Riley, where he uses marine waste he has collected from Northeastern beaches, to show the devastating effects of large industry and corporations on the environment, and specifically our oceans. The scrimshaw is now plastic bottles and other waste, instead of bones. The sailor’s valentines are now made out of found plastics instead of shells.

The display of this show is pretty near perfect. It does nothing to distract from the work he is displaying, only adds to it. They used the existing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jan Martense Schenck and Nicholas Schenck Houses, and displayed pieces of his artistic process and final pieces alongside the museum's existing collection of scrimshaw. This display excellently shows the difference between then and now, and the environmental injustices happening in the world. 

This, to me, is one of the most successful uses of waste in art to actually show the extent of the issue being discussed. Because of the way that Riley uses traditional crafts and methods of making, but with different found materials, he is able to successfully show the change in the contents of our oceans because of this. We are no longer only finding shells and bones, but trash.

- Stella