RedShift at Body Implement



photos by James Prinz

I created RedShift Party Hats in leather and feather for "Body Implement" at Nick Cave's Sound Suit Shop in Chicago's South Loop, November 2010. There's a narrative behind these hats which begins 13 years ago with a magazine tear sheet and the performance "Mercuria" by Lynn Book and Theo Bleckmann at "Here" in New York. I designed the costumes for these two vocalists who embodied more content than I've ever cloaked. Please see the clip...


This is a story about the infinite in the everyday, when invention interrupts intention with fluid generosity.

Fuller

Ready-made glow in the dark Oxford cloth, thread, pencil pleating, drapery hooks, aluminum rods, plastic sliders. Dimensions variable (appx 8' x 14')


Sustenance: 337 Singleton, Dallas TX , September 2009
An exhibit of site specific installations.
Organized by Stephen Lapthisophon and Anne Lawrence

For this exhibit I made a curtain of glow-in-the-dark fabric on a north facing wall of the Sustenance exhibit site. The primary source of light to this space was an entry door to the west. The random opening of the entry door charged the material over unmeasured intervals of time. The curtain, just by hanging there, supported a metabolic process, absorbing and emitting light, consuming and expelling light. The gathering of the curtain was a drawing process to create a fluctuating fullness containing pockets of space and darkness in each fold.


Here are some images from my research trip to Berlin: photos

Loie Fuller's Radium Dance


In Ridicule Of Spectacle


Experimental Sound Studio: Project Space, February 2009
 

This was a performance, drawing session, and photo shoot to bridge the disciplines of art and dressmaking through the act of modeling.  To develop this piece, I investigated the idea of being tarred and feathered, the alchemical symbol of the blackened mirror, and butoh performance images.  The  visual narrative took on a textural layer with writer Sara Levine's prose poem "In Which the Seamstress Speaks."  I am continually interested in how personal identity can be shaped through material interactions, and enjoy rearranging fairy tale outcomes to escape set orders.


The result of this project is a series of hand made look books for RedShift, one of which is in The Joan Flasch Artist's Book Collection.

There's a fine line between self-reflection and self-voyeurism.  
Look beyond the red dotted swatch for details...

See more photos here

A poem by
Paul Shullenberger in response to "In Ridicule Of Spectacle"

party hat central calling
elusive tassels’ nonesuch
numinous graffiti hotline:
does a stitch in time throw
clocks out of whack?

wear your words lightly
if they float you’re there
grains of sand are feathers
through foo stints as hair

stutter-dance with doodles
peripherally lensed
landscape’s scalp massage it
grab knead twang the air
--for kristin mariani




Many thanks to Carol McCurdy, Ella Stauber, David Ettinger, Sara Levine, Adam Vida, and Alex Inglizian

The Palimpsest Project



Spoke, Chicago April 26 - May 23 2010

This was a collaboration with re[public] in/decency to create an environmental and performative chalkcloth "palimpsest" to trace the intricate relationships between the physical body, transgenerational memory and landscapes of belonging. The chalkboard and chalk cloth are metaphoric contemporary incarnations of the historical palimpsest, a manuscript on parchment which has been effaced to make room for later writing, but of which antecedent traces remain. By enlarging and collectively engaging in the rite of inscribing and re-inscribing personal narratives, unique and powerful (individual and collective) connections are made, engaging in an accessibly expressive and socio-cultural dialogue.

See More Photos Here

Images from Memory Excavation, Pop Up Art Loop, Chicago May 6, 2010
Photos by Day Still

Chalk - video by Jeroen Nelemans from Kristin Mariani Frieman on Vimeo.

A Sample Of Making

Spoke, Chicago November 2 - 21 2009

A Sample of Making was a RedShift design project to provide a platform for the intensive labor involved in making clothing. For a period of three weeks I produced singular garments within the Spoke gallery space from my collection of salvaged wools in a spectrum of colors. Seeking to present my process of design alongside the product of my practice, I aimed to create opportunities for critical exchange by engaging others in the design process. Working with several interns, I held open studio hours, a workshop, and hosted a closing event to view the work created at Spoke.


New City Review
See more photos here


With Special thanks to the following interns for their time and handiwork:
Sarah Amariat
Kelsey Heiniger
Rosemary Lee
Coral Manor
Danielle Wyman

Hats


This was a RedShift design project with an environmental group called "Roots and Shoots" at Dewey Elementary School in Evanston.  Working with over 20 students from the third, fourth, and fifth grades, and a handful of parent volunteers, we trained students to sew by hand and machine to create hats out of recycled sweaters for the Evanston School Children's Clothing Association (ESCCA)

Each hat was a unique creation, bearing the mark of each student's handiwork.  My intern Coral Manor made a visual quilt out of the photos:

  
With special thanks to the Dewey School Roots and Shoots students,  4th grade teachers Pat Cleveland and Steven Files, and Rebecca Harrell for assisting with the project.

Pressing Needs: A Case Study of Cares and Desires

SAIC Sullivan Galleries, October - December 2008

Installation for J. Morgan Puett’s collaborative project Department (Store)

"Pressing Needs" is an arrangement of garment care labels and dressmaking tools set inside a display case from the former Carson, Pirie, Scott building designed by Louis Sullivan.  Collecting numerous labels out of various articles of clothing, I stitched over words using a machine darning technique.  The fabrication process removed and re-framed language to alter meaning, resulting in a colorful accumulation of poem-like fragments from my free associations with notions of care and desire.  I am continually adding to this collection, keeping the labels stored in a scroll of muslin that lengthens as needed. 

Return Relief



Audible at ESS, Chicago: June 28th - August 17th
Return Relief is a site-specific deinstallation drawing and extension of my exhibit Thread Tracings: a Dressmaker’s Still Life. Bringing a fresh supply of materials to the gallery space, and using the pinholes of the preceding installation as a guide, I created a new description of the artwork’s progression in time. The result was a large-scale wall drawing, a retracing of the original labor in relief form.

Wall drawing: thread, straight pins, ball-point pins, safety pins, tailors’ chalk, pencil, silk strips, ric rac, marker layout dots, sticker dots, wooden stretchers, steel rods, bobbins

Thread Tracings: A Dressmaker’s Still Life



Audible at ESS May 2 – June 15, 2008
Thread Tracings is a series of over 100 embroidered drawings created from a dressmaker’s raw materials: needle, thread, and muslin. The compositions are created in sequence; threads pulled from the structure of the cloth hold a memory of linear form. This form, sometimes tangled, sometimes open, is captured in the process of tracing, and then recreated with an embroidered backstitch. The newly stitched lines, all the same length, seem to float on the surface of the cloth but on closer inspection are embedded within it. The work is an exploration of repetitive action over time, creating a vocabulary of memory from the filamentary remnants found within the dressmaker’s studio.


Duet With Lynn Book: http://vimeo.com/8999859

Carving Distance
A small feeling found in an image,

A large feeling backlogged in a body,
The feeling of pulled out eyes, siting
Sitting down on a plain, a dream bed view
Of people, all kinds, mostly family-like
In rooms, infirm, unlucky and waiting
Always waiting, as close as breath or
Teeth ground once or forever, like
Time, and wind, water and the rest
On rock, on well-whispered verse dirt
Red, gray-streaked-ochres and almost
Purple, almost as if to burst open what is
Not washed away from poured-out clouds
Or whatever the multiverse fashions of its
Myriad, mumbled and slung round stuff
Scaped, racing and struck loopy by pulls
And pull-pulses and rubber nosed pussies
Or something like that: flamed, crevassed
With arms and other limbs that swing but
Mostly reach burnt and calloused out
Hollows.  This is what is behind the words
That floated up last, in the bed boat, this
Morning with leg skin embrace in patches
Branch over branch, bone rumbles and whirs
Loose life soft-all, a momentary calm
While recall strikes a lonely path out of the
Mouth part, tongue sprouted up from heart
Of heart-shaped dream cell, a thought, more
Feeling, feeling less image, but here with
My fingers I do the thing I ask of sadness
: to carve love out of distance …

- Lynn Book

Constructivist Dress



Museum of Contemporary Art  Chicago, July 2005
Reconstruction of a 1922 Liubov Popova dress for Stephen Lapthisophon’s installation My Heritage, My Tradition, My Voice.


Photos by James Prinz