Our artists: Erica Spitzer Rasmussen

Erica Spitzer Rasmussen creates amazing clothing from organic materials, like dried tomatoes, fish skin, hair and manufactured materials like Bandaids, and fortunes from Chinese fortune cookies. Her pieces are powerful, yet delicate. She makes handmade paper which she uses as a base for her pieces, adorning them with multiple items.

She writes, "I use clothing as subject matter because it provides me a ground on which to investigate identity and corporeality. My garments are metaphors. They can encompass narrative qualities, illustrate and dissolve bodily fears, or act as talismanic devices.

In addition to utilizing handmade paper, I often incorporate non-archival media into my work. I derive great joy from transforming everyday materials into something personal, meaningful and beautiful. When I see tomato paste, dog hair, sausage casings, spent tea bags or dried fish skins, I envision a work that may be transitory in nature, but rich in surfaces."

Erica teaches studio arts as an Associate Professor at Metropolitan State University (St. Paul, MN).

Our artists: Ingrid Goldbloom Bloch

Ingrid Goldbloom Bloch's fantastic undergarments take the idea of lingerie into a new realm. She weaves utilitarian materials: aluminum strips from cans, dryer parts, rivets, and other metal odds and ends into life-sized bras, undies and garter belts. She incorporates the rich colors and shiny nature of these materials into stunning pieces which rival any designer style.

She writes, "I love hardware stores. As a little girl, I would accompany my father on his errands and get lost in the aisles imagining all the things I could make from the bits and pieces I came across. Hardware stores are treasure troves of hidden art forms. If one looks beyond an items intended purpose, it can be transformed into something surprising and beautiful. By using ordinary items designed for other purposes to create my art, one is compelled to take a closer look at the materials and see them in a new light.

Trashy Lingerie 1, 2 & 3 are meant to be humorous depictions of women’s undergarments and the pursuit of looking sexy at the expense of comfort."

Our artists: Diane Savona

Diane Savona's pieces merge art with archaeology. Her visually rich pieces are constructed from scraps of other's lives: old fabric, clothing and sewing notions, layered under and over, revealed like the strata of a dig site. In addition to these "Fossil" pieces, she has created a series of "soft-bodied specimens"; old corsets and girdles displayed in Mason jars. It is a witty take on the science of collection and cataloguing.

She writes, "My art is constructed of salvaged linens, found at the local equivalent of archaeological digs-garage sales. Once-common crocheted doilies and embroidered tablecloths are becoming extinct. By presenting them as unearthed fossil specimens, I hope to change viewer perception of our textile heritage."

In 2010, Diane held a one-woman exhibit titled "Closet Archaeology' at the Hermitage Museum in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey. She has exhibited in many fiber arts shows around the country.

Our artists: Amanda N. Simons

Amanda N. Simon's work revolves around our prescribed roles in life. Her paintings incorporate old sewing patterns which add a layer of direction to her outstanding figure work. Amanda confronts the viewer with visual statements of gender and emotion.

"Each of us is born into a blueprint.

Ours lives, in many ways, are defined solely by our adherence to, or deviation from, that blueprint.

As a visual artist, I use the juxtaposition of the human form and the concept of a social blueprint as a metaphor for the constraints of contemporary social expectation. My visual language is a means of exploring, deconstructing, and exposing concepts of gender pre-destiny, gender expectation, and the reciprocal need to challenge those American norms. As an expository commentary on contemporary gender roles and sexuality, my work has served as a cathartic visual autobiography and a challenge to my viewers to deconstruct their own identity on the gender continuum."

Amanda is curently enrolled in the Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Our artists: Julie Harris

Julie Harris' artwork creates a bridge between memory and time with her lovely printed handmade papers and clothing. Vintage undergarments, Christening gowns, and school uniforms are the canvases for her printed images. The images range between anatomical, religious and historical, placing in each piece a sense of history and meaning.

Julie currently teaches printmaking and bookmaking at Kean University in New Jersey and has exhibited her work nationally and internationally.

Our artists: Joanne Kaliontzis

Joanne Kaliontzis creates digital collage imagery based on mid-20th century advertising. Iconic campaigns for products such as Maidenform Bras from the 1960s gain new life when a rich palette of color, pattern and repetition is applied. Joanne is a Boston-based graphic designer.

Our artists: Lisa Knox

Lisa Knox's evocative and stark charcoal drawings of old underwear create a powerful sense of history of the owner.

She wrties, "When articles of clothing are unfolded and tacked to the wall, fact and fiction become entwined– the party dress when deprived of its wearer retains a myriad of complex social, psychological and sensory associations. I use clothing to evoke memory, sensation, nostalgia and loss. In as much, a garment is more akin to memento mori than traditional still life. For instance, I look up and see a dress. I look down and paint an artifact, a fossil, a molted transparent shell from another time. Though I analyze the dress as I would an object in a still life, I render the form to evoke the transitory passage of time – knowing that the garments’ owner has grown older and changed. My ultimate hope is that these still life’s and the objects that they represent will retain their charm and give truth to Emerson’s word, “If eyes were made for seeing then beauty is its own excuse for being.”"

Lisa is an oil painter and principle instructor at the Fort Point Studio School which she founded in 2005. For many years her work has focused on still life and portraiture with subject matter ranging from cups to old garments.

Our artists: Laura Ann Jacobs

Laura Ann Jacobs' pieces are witty and beautiful. The desire of the idealized woman's body fitted with unconventional trappings result in a ironic wink at seduction.

She writes, "No longer bound by constraints of clothing alone, women may now have the delightful pleasure of deforming themselves from the inside out. Where once ribs were merely moved around and internal organs forced together by outside MAN-ipulations, now ribs are removed, secondary sex characteristics are sucked up and out like so much fatty tissue, and orbic lobes of the new ideal replace God given natural endowments..."

Laura Ann lives near Boston and has exhibited her work around the country.

Our artists: Miriam Schaer

Miriam Schaer is a Brooklyn-based multimedia book artist, and a Lecturer in the Interdisciplinary MFA Program in Book and Paper at Columbia College in Chicago.

She exhibits extensively and her work has been included in shows at the Museum of Art and Design and The Museum of the Bible in Art, both in Manhattan, and the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY.

She is represented in numerous collections, including the Arts of the Book Collection at Yale University; the Mata & Arthur Jaffe Collection: Book as Aesthetic Object at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture, Duke University, Durham, NC.

Her work has earned a NYFA Artists Fellowship, inclusion in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for the Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum, and representation at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale in South Korea. In 2007, she was an artist in residence for the Imagining the Book Biennale at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt.

Ms. Schaer frequently uses garments such as girdles, bustiers, brassieres, and aprons as well as children’s’ clothing as materials for unique and limited edition books. The fabrics are manipulated and embellished to serve as enclosures, inside which hand-made books explore feminine, social, and spiritual issues.

Our artists: Diane Bronstein

Diane Bronstein is the curator and one of the participating artists in the "Underneath it all: Desire, Power, Memory & Lingerie" exhibit.

Diane creates paper "intimate apparel". Her pieces consist of nude figure drawings on 18" x 24" newsprint paper, which she then hand sews into bras, girdles, slips, camisoles and corsets. The pose of the artwork determines the size and style of the clothing. "I love the relationship between the drawings of the nudes, and the clothing. The juxtaposition of using underwear to reveal nude images reverses the order of underwear's intended use: naked skin covered by cloth." The provocative poses hint at what the wearer desires, fears, or imagines that the apparel reveals.

Her pieces have shown around the country including New York City, Chicago, Denver, and regionally in New England. In late 2010, she had a solo exhibit at the Frame 301 Gallery at Monserrat College of Art, where she displayed 23 pieces of clothing on clotheslines.

Diane is a graphic designer in Boston.

Welcome

This blog will serve as a showcase for our upcoming art exhibit titled "Underneath it all: Desire, power, memory & lingerie." Please visit our pages to find out about our artists.