Artwork Spotlight: Rose Sellery, Skin and Bones

We’re delighted to have three wonderful works by Rose Sellery (@rose_sellery) in Inside Out: Seeing Through Clothing. Today we’re highlighting Skin and Bones, a wearable sculpture made of found animal bones, upholstery piping and a tea-stained back brace.

These materials evoke flesh-colored body parts that echo and exaggerate the imagined wearer’s skeletal form. Like much of Sellery’s work, Skin and Bones plays with language—the title offering a wry commentary on a fashion industry that promotes unhealthy body standards in its demand for thinness.

Moving beyond the gallery, the artist’s conceptual garments come to life on the runway in fashion shows with Pivot: The Art of Fashion (@pivot.artfashion), organized by Sellery and Tina Brown (@ilkastyle).

Artwork Spotlight: Reiko Fujii, Glass Ancestral Kimono III and My Daughter's Glass Kimono

#MondayArtworkSpotlight: Reiko Fujii’s (@glasskimono) “Glass Ancestral Kimono III” and "My Daughter's Glass Kimono" currently on display in the exhibition Inside Out: Seeing Through Clothing. Reiko Fujii’s wearable glass kimonos consist of more than 2000 pieces of individually hand-cut glass, fused together to make 224 three-inch by three-inch frames.

Within each frame is an image of the artist’s family. After creating her first glass kimono, Fujii journeyed to the towns in Japan where her relatives had lived, wearing the kimono as a mobile, inhabited shrine. When the kimonos are worn, they make the sound of wind chimes as the bottom rows strike each other. With the light reflecting from the rich glass texture and the haunting sounds of windchimes, the kimono acts as a multi-sensory tribute to her family and the many generations who came before her.

Also featured in this exhibition is the companion piece "My Daugher's Glass Kimono," created by the artist to represent the dual ancestry of her daughter, Melissa. This work combines images of the artist’s relatives as well as the familial images of her husband, whose family emigrated from Czechoslovakia. According to the artist, the continuity of the past, present and future is symbolized in this work, which includes images of her daughter’s Japanese and Czechoslovakian ancestors. Both kimonos were worn by the artist and her daughter and performed at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York in 2009.

Artwork Spotlight: Charlotte Kruk, Let Me Bake Cake, 2011

Charlotte Kruk, Let Me Bake Cake, 2011
Found packaging, machine stitched, screenprinted

#MondayArtworkSpotlight: Charlotte Kruk’s (@charlotte.kruk) “Let Me Bake Cake,” currently on display in the exhibition Inside Out: Seeing Through Clothing. Using leftover food wrappers as her primary materials, Kruk crafts a stunning, Marie Antoinette-inspired gown that features the packaging of every element needed to bake a cake. However, unlike the waste that characterized Antoinette’s decadent rule, Kruk upcycles discarded and salvaged materials to create her fashionable forms.

According to the artist, these wearable sculptures are designed to “slyly wink” at a culture that often compares women, particularly well-dressed women, to decorations, consumables, and “eye candy.” Initiating dialogue on packaging, brand association, and power structure, Kruk’s work also comments on the gluttony and wastefulness of a disposable, packaged society.