PROJECTS > Body Form

Twenty-Three by Thirty-Four by Four
Twenty-Three by Thirty-Four by Four
Found corset, deconstructed vintage men's straw fedora
23" x 34" x 4"

The corset is displayed opened and pinned to the wall, the shape of its architecture on display, its scaffolding unfastened. The ideal anatomy is flattened into a blueprint, showing its topography in lines of handstitched fedora straw.
Deconstructed men's straw fedoras are part of the visual grammar in several pieces. Often they represent the patrilineal/masculine in the family line but also the material is a shorthand for an archetype. In pulling and cutting the threads apart that formed the woven straw ribbons into a hat shape and then hand-stitching them, with their discolorations and signs of wear, with new relational formations. In addition to interrogating the overlay of power, structure, race, body politics and eroticism in the work there is also of the more complex ways the culture view of the gender continuum are opening like a caress or closing in a fist.