Kristin Mariani

Care is Care of

Care is Care of

A Litany of Cares, 2024

Is Dress, 2023 and Of Dress, 2024

The Arts Club of Chicago

"Care is Care of" is a sidewalk performance for Art in Odd Places 2024: Care

Two performers, one wearing an IS Dress and one wearing an OF Dress, will be interconnected by a running care label that is stitched into one dress while extending into the other, scroll-like, creating a litany of collective cares. AiOP2024: Care will take place Friday, October 18 to Sunday, October 20, 2024, along 14th Street in New York City.

YES/ON 14th Street

YES/ON 14th Street is a processional performance for AiOP 2023: DRESS

Taking place in NY on October 13th, 14th, and 15th, 2023, two performers wearing my Text Toiles will address themes of intimacy, care, language and boundaries through the production, presentation, and dissemination of a series of care labels. With performers Erica Mott, Darling Shear, and in collaboration with Michael Workman, past and present-day literary histories surrounding 14th Street will enfold with questions of how identities are formed in relation to dress, and a specific, embodied sense of place.

"YES/ON 14th Street" is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Part Cloth: La Divisione, 2022

Part Cloth: La Divisione is a 10 minute, single channel video installation framing two views between my body and its surrounding cloth during Michelle Grabner's Nido residency at the International Center for the Arts in Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy.

Part Cloth: La Divisione Vimeo link

Wearing a dress I made from silk remnants, I ascended a staircase in the Persianni Studio Building to reach the highest accessible point of the village, and a view of the Tibor river. I took several videos through different openings from inside of the dress, capturing the fleeting moment of what was visible, and highlighting the presence of my body in relation to the scenic landscape. These views were recorded from the tower of a building which carries a history of landscape painting.

Installed at opposite ends in the crypt of the Church of SS. Filippo e Giacomo, Part Cloth: La Divisione is an integration of breakdowns and partings: the dress made of cloth parts, the parting of the dress to find a view, the projection of the video that parted the red velvet curtain, and the division of the dress into three remnants—two of which were installed in the projection windows opposite the stage where the video was installed.

wall relief of dress parts

The body of the dress is now de-parted—a body of cloth split in a state of indeterminacy with remains in Monte Castelo di Vibio and Chicago. I am returning to Italy summer 2023 to revisit Monte Costello di Vibio, and restitch the dress parts for the staging of a new configuration of views.

This project was part of Michelle Grabner's 2022 robin, dove, swallow, thrush. An experimental exhibition alongside the artist residency called Nido organized by Michelle Grabner and Kelly Kaczynski at the International Center for the Arts, Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy.

YES/ON

YES/ON, SAIC Galleries, 2021

Yes/On is an installation of dress prototypes which I call Text Toiles.

Drawing from my background as a dressmaker, I stitched the letters Y, E, S, O, N into the framework of a shift dress—a simple rectangular garment whose meaning and use have changed in step with historical cultural shifts. The familiar form of this classic dress in contemporary fashion began as a comfortable undergarment to protect the outer layers of clothing from bodily fluid. Through the craft of sewing these shifts, I attend to and openly address intimacy, reflecting on conversations with my family and peers about consent, dating apps, sex positivity, language and boundaries. Considering the parameters of interpersonal relationships as intertwined with the grain of cloth, I set up the conditions for each spectator’s particular correspondence to YES, to its counterpart NO, and its inverse ON through the display of these garments in various states of openness, completion and declaration. The meaning of these terms are reliant on voice and embodiment, as clothing and language both function and fail as a boundary. Working from the parameters and experiences of my own body, I see these dresses as a cloth envelope of space where thought and feeling merge.

PDF link to Bridge Editorial: C is For Cut

photo Joerg Metzner, model Darling Shear

studio view of Text Toiles, June 2021

July 2020: This dress and its body, elsewhere

I return to the unraveling of edges—fringe as both a starting and ending point.

I am on the inside making my way out, speaking through cloth. My voice is absorbed in a garment—a body with its own pulse, shaped by hand and machine. I begin in the middle, between parts gathered and parts dispersed.

Doubled

The remnant (present) has one side, a partial outline, a semi-ghost, an expanding gap between the remnant pile (past) and my body (future). An inverse of a trace, half of which is gone, the discard remains on site. This dress and its body are elsewhere.

2, 4, and 1: threads that intertwine with 3

a study of three beginnings

A is a beginning.

Might I begin?

The wall is silent

A crack is a break in the solid.

A protest is a break in the silence.

An action

begins with a break in the action, a crack in the action, let the crack be my letter.

Intersection of lines be my H and my Y and my T

My High Tea

My Mighty H Y T

My H Y and T

I begin.

The voice inside of a body, inside of a garment, inside of a room

I am making a dress. This dress is a cavity, in the shape of a cavity—of a body. It references, without resemblance, the convoluted corridor between the ear and the mouth, where so many senses and perceptions mix, lodge, pause, and exchange. This cavity contains the inner workings of the senses, not unlike the torso contains the inner workings of the organs. This cavity is a dress, a place of feeling. This space resides around me and inside of me.

Cloth as membrane. Dress as cavity. Cavity as facade.

This dress will be made from cloth remnants which I have stitched together over the past four months while writing my thesis. Some of these stitched works are small, some large, some irregularly shaped, some geometric. Some of my remnants—when stitched together—lie flat while others complicate each others edges and undulate, yielding a shadow of a curve of a body as it drapes. This dress will be a place of convergence—of bodies, of senses, of voices.

This cloth is dry and I want to lubricate it.

A remnant suggests otherness, a body gone elsewhere, the loss of a body or a people.

In my pile of remnants I grapple with the absence of bodies, working the edges of loss, edges stalled by what (is) left.

Goneness.

These edges are formed by removal—not demarcation.

Fringe is a removal of the internal framework of woven cloth, revealing structure by the absence of threads. It holds the memory of what was there, but is released from it. Fringe is evidence on the outskirts, an unruly edge establishing a frame that indicates something has left, while something still remains.

Free Dick Higgins 214 Projects, Dallas, September 2019

Performing Danger Music Number Sixteen, 214 Projects, Dallas-September 2019

Free Dick Higgins
"A side ways glance at the polymath artist, writer and publisher as seen through a modest selection of his publications, ephemera and performances." curator Brandon Kennedy

Honesty, if you persist in it, especially if you persist in it for no particular reason, might almost become second nature. Similarly, by vigorous movement of the elbow, one can find oneself to be naïve. Is this why naïveté is the most useful of the virtues?
Dick Higgins May,1962

Notes on a crawl space- SAIC Columbus Base Space

Residency Installation-Year 2, July 2019

A staircase is an inverse relationship—reliant on some form of hierarchy—with the under side as one and the same as the upper side. Treads accumulate evidence of everyday ascensions and descensions. What is encountered has an impact on a body, and a body has an impact on what it encounters.