Of Knapsacks, Manbags and Murses : Health vs. Fashion

A Rant.

Last year, I carried around a shoulder bag wherever I went. I thought it was chic, and it was comfortable enough. But as I did more and more yoga, slinging around my yoga stuff in a shoulder bag, I started having strange back pains. My yoga teacher said that I should really always have weight distributed equally along my shoulders so that my back wouldn't suffer. A knapsack. So, eversince, I've been wandering around with a backpack.

But how professional can you feel, going to work with your backpack? Is there such a thing as a professional looking knapsack? And what of all these people with shoulder bags, and oversized manbags, and murses? Won't their backs hate them in the future? It makes me wonder, as well, at what point you sacrifice your health for fashion. Women do it all the time in the crazy heels that they wear. Can't there be a happy healthy medium? I am envisioning some sort of bag with bilateral gun-holster-like straps... Someone needs to get creative.

Sleeves of Feathers

I just wanted to share these fun photos, more for their sleeves of feathers than anything else... Photographs by Adrian Jutba.

Of Time and Fashion: The September Issue Review

When I first heard that the documentary The September Issue would not be released in Montreal until the end of October, I thought: “How preposterous! Doesn’t that defy the laws of fashion? Won’t it be outdated by then?” And, you, dear readers, are probably thinking the same thing: “A review about The September Issue in November? Ridiculous!” Yet, after seeing the movie, I realized that while fashion may be about always looking forward and never looking back, as American Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour succinctly stated towards the end of the film, this documentary is very much about looking back in order to reveal the process behind the glamour and mystery which is the production of Vogue. Fashion may come and go but style and the creative process remain constants throughout.


Through interviewing and following Wintour, director R.J. Cutler has gone beyond fears of the seemingly flimsy and fickle world of fashion to dig deeper into the business, the politics and the process of creation. At times, Wintour reveals snippets about her life and her work. While The Devil Wears Prada had allegedly drawn from rumours of the Editor-in-Chief’s cold and exacting demeanour, Wintour comes across differently. Always stylish, the British grand dame of Vogue does cut straight to the point, yet does so thoughtfully. Maybe it’s the way of the Brits. She does not hesitate to ask direct questions or to sit in heavy silences considering her opinions. She isn’t vengeful, she is just incredibly exacting. Throughout the portrait of Wintour and Vogue, the audience witnesses the Editor-in-Chief’s stare, a considered and calculating glance.


While some crack under the pressure of having to perform and stand by their opinions in front of Wintour, longtime colleague and fellow Brit Grace Coddington, who is the Creative Director of Vogue, stays strong. Coddington shines in The September Issue with her creative energy, joking quips and moments of emotional fragility. We are treated to several shoots under her direction, seeing everything from clothing selection to historic inspiration, from dynamic shoots to final product. A former model, Coddington has refined her eye for fashion and creates truly inspiring and artistic works. In the end, the Creative Director with a head of wild red hair reveals herself as a diligent and unflagging worker and a true artiste.


Ultimately, the documentary follows the production of Vogue’s biggest issue through vignettes of fashion shows and shoots along with personal and day-to-day moments. As Coddington rolls a rack of clothes into Wintour’s office at the conclusion of the movie, the viewers realize that the process just starts all over again. The film produces a timeless portrait, revealing the creative and personal forces continually at work behind a fashion magazine that changes from month to month. And while I may have initially bemoaned the anachronistic release of the film, it makes no sense to speak of timeliness after seeing the film. While Vogue produced the biggest issue ever in its history for September 2007, the release of the documentary a year later comes at a time that is much different. Vogue goes on producing, creating, editing and publishing. And even though we have all gained a glimpse beyond the large VOGUE letters mounted on wood-paneled wall in the elevator lobby through The September Issue, the mystique continues and I wonder: “What are they up to now?”

Adad Hannah in Montreal

Just a quick note to redirect you towards my most recent post at the Art Blog about Adad Hannah's work on display in Montreal. Go here to read all about it, or just see below...

I first came across the work of Adad Hannah work at Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s inaugural triennial exhibition focusing on Quebec artists held over a year ago. Hannah’s photographs taken at the Prado Museum showed viewers (now subjects) engaged with the art in active ways: a woman leaned in to kiss a statue of Eros, two men looked into a mirror in front of Velasquez’s Las Meninas. In Las Meninas itself, a mirror at the back of the room has been interpreted in various ways in art historical literature, and Hannah’s layering of a second mirror once again questions the role of the viewer. With his most recent show, the New York-born Montreal-based artist continues to produce memorable and engaging works of art that thoughtfully and intelligently dialogue with the history of art. This time Hannah challenged Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819).

Adad Hannah, The Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House) 8, c-print, 2009, Courtesy of Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain.

In his small solo show, The Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House), at Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain (PFOAC), Adad Hannah has documented the recreation of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. The project was a collaboration between the artist and the small community of 100 Mile House in central British Columbia, Canada. The restaging culminated after three months of preparation, the painting of a more than 1000 square foot backdrop, and the help of twenty-two performers and a slew of crew and volunteers. Over two days, the tragic and triumphant scene was performed as a tableau vivant, held for five to ten minutes for audiences, drawing classes and for photo and video capture.

Adad Hannah, The Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House) 5, c-print, 2009, Courtesy of Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain.

Those who visit PFOAC will see various photographs from this effort, including different iterations of models, close-ups of details and an eerily vacant scene. If you pause long enough in front of the two screens at the back of the room, you realize that the models are actually moving minutely, their muscles shaking as they hold their poses. Beyond the photos, this living canvas questions the performative aspect of Géricault’s original work.

Théodore Géricault’s original canvas depicted a hopeful moment in the tragedy of the 1816 wreck of the ship Méduse, in which members of the crew, abandoned for two weeks by their captain, finally see salvation in the form of a distant ship. No concerted effort had been made by the captain to rescue the 150 crewmembers not able to flee in lifeboats. After two weeks at sea, exposed to the elements, starvation, desperation and insanity, only 15 men remained. The canvas exposed the corruption of French military powers who had appointed a captain 20 years out of service and whose mistakes caused the ship to run aground. The canvas also controversially put a black man in a position of strength, signaling the distant ship for help. Géricault created numerous studies after the 1816 event and finally unveiled his massive masterpiece in the 1819 Paris Salon to fervent and impassioned remarks.

Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, Salon of 1819, © R.M.N./D. Arnaudet, Courtesy of the Louvre Museum

In the act of recreating a masterwork of French Romanticism (in colours decidedly more vivid than the original), Adad Hannah reveals the artificiality of posed art. Géricault’s numerous studies attempted to refine the most powerful image possible of a tragic real-life event. In recycling an iconic image, Hannah presents the documentation of a live re-enactment of an old French masterwork, which is in itself the documentation of a recreation of an actual event. While you can easily be lost in this whirlpool of interpretation and historic revisionism, you need only to stand in front of one of Hannah’s screens and watch the minutely moving models to understand the confrontation of art and reality, revealing the delicate and lengthy process of staging models in order to recreate an epic moment from reality, a moment in history already lived and already passed.

Adad Hannah, The Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House) 9, c-print, 2009, Courtesy of Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain.

Adad Hannah’s The Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House) remains on display in Montreal until November 28 and will grace the walls of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT from March 21 to May 30, 2010.

Post-Halloween Ramble

Weeks before Halloween, a friend asked if I was excited for the holiday. And, honestly, I just shrugged and gave a non-committal answer. But looking back on the last two days, from preparation to party, I've discovered that I actually enjoy Halloween quite a lot. It's fun to dress up and look wild, pretend to be creatures and other people, slap on the makeup and just enjoy.

Friday night I was slated to go to a zombie party and never having dressed up as a zombie, I didn't know where to start. Upon googling zombie, I discovered that pale-faced, sunken-eyed and bloody were the ways to go. Liking to make things myself, I looked up a recipe for fake blood and concocted the creation using corn syrup, corn starch, cocoa powder, food colouring and a bit of water. The results were scary.


Getting my costume together involved ripping a shirt I was going to get rid of and "bloodying" it. I also spent some time doing makeup, which turned out to be incredibly fun... I ended up snapping a whole bunch of photos making faces in the mirror. Before I even stepped out the door, I was satisfied. Honestly, I could have taken the photos and then taken off the makeup and gone to bed I was so satisfied. But I did party down with my fellow zombies and reveled in the costumed landscape of people.



On Halloween proper, Dad and I carved a pumpkin with fabulously sordid results.


That night I was dressing up as Max from Where The Wild Things Are. I was pretty happy with the creativity of my costume, made possible by Dollarama. A tail out of socks, ears made out of a carwash glove, a construction paper crown and a sweatsuit turned inside out. A cuddly cute costume, it seemed like only an intelligent informed few were in the know as I was taken for a tiger, a raccoon and multiple times as a rabbit. Nonetheless, I had a great time dancing away, King of the Wild Things.




In retrospect, dressing up and changing up your identity are such fun. I am already looking forward to the next time I get to switch up Stefan for someone/something else. Bring back the costume party!

So that's my ramble. Peace.

Transition

This is the tunnel I sometimes took from the Metro station to work. Miraculously it led to a beautiful museum. Loved the curves of this capture/experience.

When Rain Turns to Snow

One chilly fall day, it got a little too cold. But not cold enough to bring out my camera in the park near my house. What colours.

Reviewing

This weekend I had the pleasure to see the yoga movie Enlighten Up! and the ballet Romeo et Juliette. It's given me a lot to think about and I thought I would share some thoughts.


Enlighten Up! is a documentary that features a documentarian who follows a newbie for 6 months as he explores the world of yoga and tries to make sense of it all. The subject, Nick Rosen, is as pragmatic as they come and we follow him from New York to LA to India as he quests to figure out why people do yoga. I enjoyed the movie although it was flawed (it was basically the journey that the documentarian wanted to take, and Nick was trying to go from zero to yogi in 6 months). It seems silly to flit from one teacher to another and sample yoga as if you are in a candy shop trying all the flavours.

The journey that the easy-on-the-eyes Nick takes mirrors a journey that I have been taking, trying to find answers, trying to find the perfect style, trying to find the perfect guru. I've come to discover that there are different styles, there are different ways of approaching the same problem. If there is one point in space, there are an infinite number of ways of getting there. Ultimately it isn’t about finding anything external at all, but discovering your self and your style. The filmic journey provided moments of humour, instances of captivating imagery and an interesting main character (interesting more for his pragmatism more so than his looks). But it really posed a very deep and confusing question: what is yoga really? And I have come to realize that it is an awareness and a point of view on the world, about that whole world inside you and all the invisible clutter that needs recognition and overturning. And while the film didn't quite get there, I didn't really expect it to in retrospect, but it certainly did crisscross the path that I have been treading myself.



Les Grands Ballets Canadiens recounted the very familiar yet always tragic tale of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Restaging Jean-Christophe Maillot's version of the story set to Prokofiev's music, the rendition I saw last night was full of passion, danced on a simple set with some stunning costumes. I am always in awe of what dancers can convey without the use of words - pure communication, emotion at its raw-est. Even the conveyance of love - such an abstract emotion - was rendered with a gesture of hands uniting and moving in vertical wave motion, in unison. And the gesture first 'spoken' by Romeo and Juliet came up again and again, re-enacted in a puppet show, reminisced by the lovers and rendered tragic in the final moments of the show. When Tybalt died, Lady Capulet (Aline Shurger) took my breath away, dancing with such grief, with swooping movements, her hair bursting out of her tight bun, the black and grey billows of her dress, the violent loss of her cape.

Throughout the performance I had chills, Prokofiev's thundering and dramatic Dance of the Knights penetrated right into me. The cast featured many talented dancers from the GBC's company, especially Mercutio (Andre Silva) who danced with personality and extra athleticism. It's amazing when moments in a ballet can make you laugh out loud. Or remain stunned, as the case was at the end of the evening last night.