Artist: Tenant of Culture
Exhibition title: Climate | Change
Venue: clearview, London, UK
Date: August 4 – 27, 2017
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and clearview, London
Note: List of works can be found here
Non-functioning trends embroidered into utilitarian garments. Unethical sustainability and a backdrop of books with no words, whilst a cover band perform on a marble-floored converted warehouse. Cut off jeans currently hold the same longevity as the recent uprise of the figurative. Why wait around? Change now! Said the pinstripe blazer to the tracksuit bottoms.
clearview is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in the U.K. by Tenant of Culture. Climate | Change continues her ongoing practice-based research into the institutional archive: its functions and themes such as preservation and decay, storage, display and cultural hierarchy. She questions how we determine what should be saved, stored, preserved and protected.
For clearview she extends her research into the relationship between preservation, morality and trend: the fleeting and contingent versus the durably preserved and standardised ‘Moral Law’. If the aim of morality is to function by a ‘Moral Law’ that aspires to be universally valid, you could argue that fashion, as a phenomenon, is its binary opposite: functioning without archive or any sense of permanence. Like cultural amnesia, it highlights only to forget.
Tenant of Culture confronts how contemporary art has a contradictory shyness with the idea of being on trend. For clearview, she explores the current rise of sustainability as a trend and capitalist narrative. She uses processes pertinent to these subjects, such as recycling, preserving, repurposing and utilising/dumpster-diving for discarded materials from the waste bins of vintage garment production factories that employ the aesthetics of ideology as a marketing strategy.
Whilst primarily functioning as an exhibition, Climate | Change acts equally as a trend report, examining how idealism and activism are often employed as a mode of performative representation. Why does fashion as a phenomenon continuously fail to be politically correct, and is this a result of misinterpretation and prejudice, or is fashion intrinsically unable to be morally just?
Climate | Change is kindly supported by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie.
