Artist Kimberly Brooks' "Thread & Bone" show @CooperBuilding extended through July 24.
The
historic Cooper building sits in the heart of downtown L.A.’s fashion
district, and now a new sculpture hangs in the heart of that heart: The
Cooper announced Wednesday it has permanently acquired artist Kimberly
Brooks’ 8-foot-tall uncoated steel pendant “The Ephemerality of Manner,”
which evokes a Victorian-era hoop skirt housing a woman’s muscled legs
kicking outward.
The piece, the first art to be permanently added
to the 1927 building, is part of Brooks’ site-specific installation
“Thread and Bone,” which can be seen through July 24. It stitches
together video, collage work, textile pieces, performance and the welded
steel sculpture, the centerpiece. As it dangles from the lobby ceiling,
casting shapes and shadows in the windows, the sculpture is shot
through with subtle complexities and contradictions traversing fashion,
feminism, architecture and art history. Brooks, who teaches painting at Otis College of Art and Design in L.A., recently attended the Museum of Contemporary Art's rocking gala,
joined by her husband, the actor Albert Brooks. But more work lies
ahead: She is creating four new sculptures for other fashion district
buildings. “Thread and Bone,” commissioned by the Cooper, was a
co-production of the Do Art nonprofit public art foundation and the Sage
Projects consultancy. A closing performance will take place later this
summer, after which the sculptural element will remain. “It just looks
like it belongs here,” Brooks said during a recent conversation. This is such a site-specific work. How did the space inform the piece?
The
Cooper had asked me to do a painting show. But I walked in and
instantly saw an installation with this gigantic sculpture and a video.
The walls are so high that a bunch of paintings, with these giant cement
pillars, would just feel dwarfed. I felt like you needed something to
anchor the space on a big level, and you needed textile
because this is the fashion district. I knew I wanted tall, dramatic
drapes to soften the cement pillars. So in addition to the steel
sculpture and the video, I bought bolts of this gray linen in the fabric
mart to make the 20-foot-tall curtains around the room and used the
same material to stage a performance piece the night of the opening. How did the people in the Cooper building, and fashion itself, factor in as you were conceptualizing the piece?
This room, the lobby, was completely white and bare -- but the people
were these walking works of art. So I sat down and just watched. All
these people walking around here are so hipster fabulous, they’re very
stylish. I began thinking: What makes fashion interesting other than
being a language within painting? And that is: It sort of binds us and
frees us at the same time. I kept going back to this time in history
when fashion was sort of at its most exaggerated with these crinoline,
large forms -- they were undergarments made of wire -- so I started
scouring for imagery that evoked this form.
I took my paintings
from my The Stylist Project. I have very high-resolution images of them
-- they were oil paintings -- and I literally cut out the fabric that I
had painted and draped it over the forms. I created these digital prints
of collages integrating photography and painting. The
centerpiece of your installation, the metal sculpture, is both abstract
and narrative at once, casting geometric reflections in the building’s
windows and nodding to fashion history. Can you tell us about it?
It’s
welded steel, 8 feet tall and 6 feet wide. I worked with a fabricator
to create it. But before that stage, I used metal sheets of copper that I
cut into thin strips to create these little maquettes to work with when
designing the sculpture. They’re amazing to work with, different than
wire. That’s how I created the thickness and the legs and the angles I
wanted them to be at. I wanted the legs to be muscular, not dainty. I
wanted it to be sort of fierce. Fashion so much expresses the state of
the rights of women at the time, and I wanted to tilt on its head your
recollections of this era, in the late 1800s, when women didn’t even
vote. What were you trying to say with the title of the piece?
I
called it, initially, “The Ephemerality of Style.” Because I loved the
fact that it would last forever -- the material, itself, is so permanent
and brutal, uncoated steel. Then I thought “style” isn’t quite the
right word. I renamed it “The Ephemerality of Manner.” I wanted to
remind people walking through the building that right now X, Y and Z is
in fashion in their minds, but it comes and goes quickly. I wanted to
show something that is totally out of fashion now -- a Victorian
undergarment -- but that will be here forever, both ephemeral and
permanent at the same time. And this was all before I knew they’d be
keeping it in the building as a permanent sculpture. The
video portion of the installation -- black-and-white imagery depicting
giant scissors in tiny hands working through ripples of gray silk -- is
this sort of textured, almost sensual counterpoint to the steel
sculpture that hangs opposite it. Why add the video?
This
is a historic building, the heart of the fashion district. People come
here from all over the country. The video of sewing and cutting is about
the root of what goes on in this building. It’s a 2 minute, 18 second
video piece called “Labor.” I shot it on my iPhone. Those are my
daughter’s and a bunch her friends’ hands. I bought gray and black
fabric because I wanted to get that reflective quality, and I used big,
thick needles and thread so you could really see it.
We’re so
removed from how things are made now. We’re constantly looking at our
devices, and I wanted to just kind of go back to the roots of the
beginning of how things are made when you talk about fashion: somebody
cutting and sewing. And that provides a juxtaposition to the outcome of
what walks back and forth through this building, all these people
wearing all this stuff -- and they get to see that. What are you envisioning for the new fashion district sculptures -- and what inspires you about the downtown L.A. landscape?
Members
of the Downtown L.A. fashion district BID [Business Improvement
District] saw the Cooper installation and are now commissioning me to do
four new sculptures at four different locations on Broadway including
in front of the Ace Hotel. It’s a project in partnership with the Think
Tank Gallery.
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