Curated by Miwah Lee & Kelly Kirkland
October 24- December 3, 2022
OUT/FIT is a group exhibition highlighting three Los Angeles-based artists – Charles Kelman, Nathaniel Santos, and Min Ji Son – who use the visual language of fashion design as a narrative framework to be expanded and disrupted. Each artist pays homage to the layered systems of garment production, often working on a small scale with repurposed and handmade materials and prioritizing process over final product. The resulting garment-objects reveal unique stories about the relationship between humans, clothes, and the environment – a kinetic exchange marked by harmony and conflict, construction and deconstruction, and dreamlike visions of a future built on the remnants of the past.
Miwah Lee is a first-generation Korean American photographer and director living and working out of Los Angeles. She is a former student of UNR, graduating with a BFA in Photography. Her strong interest in fashion and music has led her career into fashion photography, creative styling and directing. Her focus has been to collaborate with creative conceptual designers that are challenging the status quo and building community.
Kelly Kirkland is a freelance researcher based in San Francisco, CA. She has supported numerous exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the De Young Museum and was a 2018-19 writer-in-residence at Art Practical, where she published essays and reviews highlighting emerging artists in the Bay Area. Her areas of interest include fashion criticism, trend research, independent publishing, and olfactory culture. This is her first collaboration with Holland Project.
the artists
Charles Kelman, the artist behind the clothing label Fear Safe, views up cycling as a way to resist consumer-capitalist waste. His recent work involves developing lace through a process of destruction: by manipulating disregarded garments into delicate gowns, Kelman points to the fragility of our ecosystem under industrialization, while also highlighting the beauty that can be found amidst the decay. FEARSAFE.NET
Nathaniel Santos‘ latest collection DESPERADO for his label BEBET consists of recycled fabrics sourced from thrift stores: miniskirts, beaded bracelets, and neon fabrics are paired with avant-garde cutting and draping in a dialogue between y2k aesthetics and minimalist design. Pinned and reshaped with the designer’s signature book rings, these items are a study in fashion nostalgia. The materials themselves are just as important as the places they represent, who cites the “raw, ephemeral, desperate glamour” shared by LAand Reno as inspiration for the collection. BEBET OFFICIAL
Min Ji Son’s practice Minxcenter is a richly dimensional, multi-character universe built out through a complex process of layering media. Pencil drawings of figures, ceramic figurines of those drawings, paintings of those figurines, and digital renderings of all of the above culminate in designs that the artist transfers onto fabric and sews into gloves, socks, hats, dresses, and more. Minxcenter outfits are thus a gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, consisting of characters that exist in infinitely mutable forms. MINJISON.COM
CLOSING RECEPTION
12/3 | 5-7 PM
FILM SCREENING: MCQUEEN, 2018
11/29 | 7PM | Free
Directed by Ian Bonhôte and co-directed/written by Peter Ettedgui. A personal look at the extraordinary life, career and artistry of Alexander McQueen. Through interviews with his closest friends and family, recovered archives, visuals and music, McQueen is an authentic celebration and thrilling portrait of the fashion visionary.
WIP WORKSHOP W/ ISABELA REYES KLEIN
12/2 | 3:30PM | Free for WIP Students
In this workshop for high school-aged artists, artist Isabela ‘Bela’ Reyes Klein will lead participants in techniques for deconstructing and restructuring used/thrifted garments into original pieces. Participants will also tour and engage in a discussion regarding themes of the exhibition “OUT/FIT”. Learn more about WIP.
About the instructor: Bela identifies as a Queer Disabled Latinx artist, their transdisciplinary artworks deconstruct and reimagine cultural, established, and physical limitations within the boundaries of skin, space, and visual structures. Klein graduated with a BFA in Art and Technology with a fine arts concentration from Mills College in 2022 while dual enrolled at University of California Berkeley
The HP Galleries 2022 Curator Series is made possible in-part through a grant from Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities and invites regional & national artist-curators to organize art and humanities programs in collaboration with HP Galleries. The Curator Series aims to expand the scale and scope of conversations presented by curators and visual artists beyond our gallery walls. This provides a setting to consider how theoretical frameworks and contemporary art production impact our current cultural environment.
The post OUT/FIT appeared first on The Holland Project.