The Stuff of Akrewed Memories
By Tom Wachunas
“A house is just a place to keep your stuff
while you go out and get more stuff.” -
George Carlin
EXHIBIT: From The House of Hoard: A Collector’s
Collection of Hoard Couture, work by Judi Krew at Translations Art Gallery,
331 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton, THROUGH APRIL 26. Gallery open Wed. –
Sat. Noon to 5 p.m.
Assembled assorted appurtences of artistic
attire. A bodacious bric-a-brac boutique. A curious collector’s colloquium on
cheap chic. A disambiguation of dressy detritus. An elaborate exposition of
eccentric entities. A fanciful flurry of floordrobes. A goofy gamut of glad
rags.
Apparently, this
show has awakened the word hunter/gatherer in me. It’s an appropriate enough
pursuit when considering the content and presentation of Judi Krew’s Hoard Couture.
With this exhibit, she
showcases her ongoing line of sculpted dresses. It’s a sprawling pastiche of
myriad odds and ends constructed to look like whacky pop diva gowns from
another dimension (eat your hearts out Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Ke$ha, Miley
Cyrus, Katy Perry, et al.). But that’s a somewhat superficial impression. So don’t
make the mistake of neglecting to read Krew’s statement as well as the title
documents that accompany each work.
You might call these objects the evolved
culmination of an error in judgment - what she calls in her statement “…a great
idea gone totally wrong.” Once upon a time, Krew determined a protocol for preserving
personal memories by making dresses from all manner of well-organized and
stored ingredients. So she insists she’s not a “hoarder” in the pathological
sense of the word. Understandable enough. Call her, then, an avid gatherer of stuff with which she makes very funky
armor against forgetting. She planned to put her creations on hangers. However,
the formal demands in manifesting her idea presented unforeseen problems to be
solved. Krew needed to be not just an inventive clothier, but a structural
engineer as well. The dresses far outgrew closet storage, blossoming into
full-fledged freestanding sculptures. And they lived heftily ever after.
A
host of heady hilarities. Judi-cious jumbles of jocular junk. Lavish lumps of
levity. A marvelous marrying of materials. A pretty profusion of processed
petticoats. A riotous raiment roundup.
Humorous word-play is a significant
element in Krew’s descriptions. One dress laden with animal bones and fur is
marked, “They used to say I was nothing but skin and bones.” Another made of
matchbooks, “This dress could be really hot if it were not so striking.” And
another - a second version of a wedding gown made from plastic Wonder Bread
wrappers and which melted in an unprotected gallery window – reads, “She rises
again…it was the yeast I could do.”
Beyond the sheer
spectacle of meticulously composed color schemes, engaging pattern dynamics and
entertaining tactile ornamentation, these works are intriguing celebrations of
the power of physical matter to evoke the intangible. Ordinary consumerist
tchotchkes take on a vibrant life of their own and become extraordinary totems
of remembrance – what Krew likens to “…personal encyclopedias or scrapbooks.”
Snappy samplings of surreal styles. A
treasure trove of tantalizing textures. A vantage point on variform vanities.
Wondrous wads of whimsicality. A zenith of zany Zeitgeist.
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