Held in Suspension
At the Foothills Art Center in Golden, artist Mattie O.’s solo exhibition Held in Suspension represents the lives of women caught within strictly prescribed ways of how to present themselves. There is “ugliness in the world,” she posits in her statement, “but there still can be beauty.” The beauty, though imposed, is “held in suspension,” showing the delicate tension between fashioning one’s self into what society wants a woman to look like versus self-expression free of these expectations.
Made up primarily of sculptures of dresses, the exhibit displays a range of feminine attire from traditional gowns to revealing, fanciful costumes. The dresses are constructed using wire armatures covered in a paper produced by the artist with abacá—a fiber created from the leaves of wild banana trees. Though this natural material is fragile, the dresses represent women in their solid being.
One of the first works you encounter in the exhibition is titled Candy Wrappers and it refers to the women who accused Harvey Weinstein of rape. On a slowly turning mobile, miniature, framed dresses pass by. The artist crafted these garments with the abacá fiber paper and painted them with “interference” acrylic, which creates a metallic finish like a candy wrapper. In the middle of the simple frames, the dresses appear agonizingly bound in. Some of the dresses depict the clothing of real women in the trials and some are imagined by Mattie O.
In the next room, there is a cautionary message on the wall: to be mindful of the fragile dresses hanging throughout the rooms. The life-sized dresses gently turn, in fact, due to the slight movement of air you create as you walk through the space. Many of the titles of these pieces refer to dresses for particular occasions for “Kiki.” According to the artist, “Kiki” comes from the name of the dress form mannequin used to mold the sculptural garments. Kiki’s Walk in the Wood Dress, for example, features a green and gold latticed skirt with a gemstone-fringed and velvet-strung bodice, recalling wet moss and an enchanted forest.
Fergi’s Social Distancing Dress, in the same gallery, consists of nails poking through the outer layers of the dress, freshwater pearls, an interior covered in blue crystals, and a skirt of large, flat oyster shells punctured by wires that flair out around the implied body, making you keep your distance. A watch on a chain dangling from the dress’s hanger seems to refer to time being out of joint in 2020—as the title card says “Time is elastic during lockdown”—while also a nod to Lewis Carroll’s Alice.
In another room, Mattie O. has created a collection of Venus figures. Kiki’s Kintsugi Dress has an abacá bodice that evokes the familiar Venus de Milo torso, but pierced with holes filled with interlaced brass wire and pearls. Kintsugi is the Japanese practice of mending broken ceramics with gold lacquer, thus highlighting rather the hiding the repair. Kiki’s Seeds of Gold Dress appears to be the precursor or previous stage of the Kintsugui Dress, with its interwoven brass wire covered only sparsely in abacá, seemingly sprouting from white seeds like a fringe along the bottom hem.
Departing from the fantastical attire, in the final gallery Mattie O. stops to consider what women wear ordinarily. From a T-shirt featuring a peace sign to Mondrian and Yves Saint Laurent-inspired suit sets, masks, and funky bikinis, the artist seems to pay homage to fashion history from the 1950s-60s to the present. Titled Laundry Room, the individual pieces hang somewhat lifeless, like laundry drying on a line, in contrast to the illusory bodies evoked in the previous works. The humor of this real world scene of women’s clothing seems empowering in a different way, celebrating women’s fashion choices that represent liberation from past constraints and strides toward self-actualization.
Held in Suspension is on view through October 25 and is well worth a trip to Golden.