WEAR(E) Curated group show at Chashama/The Urban Garden Room

One Bryant Park (43rd St and 6th Ave) on April 20th. 8pm – 10:30pm

Featuring extraordinary wearable art in the form of electronics, jewelry, and protective gear.
The human body has always been a primary subject/site of art making. By natural extension, so has the skin that encapsulates it. The textures, technologies, objects that we embellish or enhance our skin with, that adapt us into our environments, reflect our own tastes and desires, as much as they reflect those of the society and time we live in.
Both the act of wearing and the objects that are worn are powerful gestures that transverse and merge society, politics, technology, material, and the body. The act of wearing and what is worn communicates information that is crucial to our contemporary climate, in a manner that is accessible to an audience beyond the white walls of the gallery.

During the live event, artists will perform their wearables inside the ‘Urban Garden Room,’ engaging and indirectly interacting with the outside public through the glass panels of the space. The setting is at once reminiscent of mannequins in a storefront and of actors on a stage—the invited audience may watch from a distance, but is not physically able to step into the performance itself.
DIAP’s interest in curating WEAR(E) [Wear We Are], showcasing wearables in the contemporary art practice, is two-fold. On the one hand, it is linked to Lev Manovich’s defense of fashion and its relevance in today’s rapidly changing world, “fashion is everything contemporary art is not: it is concerned with beauty; it is more semiotically layered than the most complex Photoshop composite; and it has one ever present constraint…the human figure.” On the other hand, it is with the intention of situating the contemporary wearable within the canonized history of art, directly linking this practice to its predecessors in the performance and time-based works of the 60s and 70s.
About “The Wearable” & “Wearables”