Andrea Loest

Installation at the Opportunity Shop in Hyde Park, Chicago

Participation and the Retail Installation

The speed of business is faster than ever. As our use of technology evolves to make our lives more efficient, the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter have been reduced into fast, easily acquired and digested models that allow us to purchase and go back to living life without having to really consider our decision making process. Retail can be a complex experience that slows the indifferent momentum of the viewer by offering an exchange of information and knowledge.  In this project, the garment functions as a tool for creating this experience.  You are invited to make a garment with me, to experience a  slow down of the retail experience that will enable you to assess your own creative approach to dress through the assembly of garment fragments. The complexity of construction shifts the focus away from the practicalities of purchase towards new considerations for the garment’s use and purpose.  As I help you to assemble a garment, I act as the agent to interfere with the speed of purchase, to make the efficient capitalist system inefficient.

Opportunity Shop Installation

This system of garment fragments proposes new potentialities for the garment, as an object to use and interpret, as remnants of existing garments are reconsidered into new parts to make new wholes.  Collage has a history of being deployed as a protest against the commodity.  In this project, the material resonance and history of these garments, collected from rural and urban mid-western thrift shops, is reconfigured into a new narrative. From the nostalgic materials a new language of dress emerges that still engages with the layers of information previously present in the cloth garments. The disassembly of men’s work clothes and their reassembly into female garment fragments, along with another reassembly by the participant, create a continuously shifting story though these materials.

The garment becomes art when it becomes a device to facilitate new experiences outside of fashion spectacle and functionality.  In my system, the pieces endlessly interchange and attach, and parts from garments that have previously established roles, (cuffs, collars, and plackets), take on new functions as extensions and decoration. Different material identities merge to create composite identities.  Every time the viewer’s focus shifts, the system yields another garment.

Opportunity Shop in Hyde Park Chicago