FASHION GALLERY

FASHION GALLERY:- Fashion is a most amiable muse, yet many artists tend to be as a substitute cautious of it. If one allows that immortality is the artist's closing goal, then it stands to cause that fashion, perishable by using definition, ought to be its dread contrary. Certainly, the artists invited here to deal with a few factor of the New York fall collections strike a large number of attitudes -- from urban appreciation to a healthful disregard. Working in a diffusion of media, inclusive of existence drawing, photography, taxidermy and college, they're as eclectic lots stylistically as they are intellectually.

Beverley Semmes and Pat Oleszko habitually work with clothes, and may both be defined as exaggerators. Semmes elongates, inside the manner of a latter-day Beardsley. The Calvin Klein T-shirt get dressed that figures in her piece is cocooned within a ordinarily distended, Semmesian garment resembling a Victorian nightgown. Knotted as it's far, the gauzy pinafore additionally shows a few jerry-built method of break out -- in a symbolist fairy tale regarding, say, a princess in a tower -- and the little get dressed internal conjures up the dream of liberation.

Oleszko, a founding pressure majeure in overall performance art and video, is excellent acknowledged for sensational, ferociously childlike costumes -- bawdy architectonic numbers with multiple teats, for example, or bustles constructed for dragons -- that invoke the Dionysian ideas of the 1960's, whilst additionally recalling Oskar Schlemmer's Bauhaus designs, Lewis Carroll and Dr. Seuss. Hers is a raw comedian vision, near in spirit to vaudeville. In her present day "Knee-o" collection, with its punning effronteries, Oleszko brings the variety-display antics of a Senor Wences into the age of MTV.

Meyer Vaisman, too, has some thing of the old-time showman about him. A few seasons back, the ever-quizzical Vaisman did a set of art work presenting Sardi's-style caricatures of himself looking just like the cigar-smoking comics of yore. Lately, he has been go-dressing filled turkeys, turning them into an outrageous forged of regulate egos. Here, poised lividly on its bale of hay, the artist's chicken surrogate wears an impressive night skirt by way of Isaac Mizrahi conjuring up mangled Dada-esque visions of Marie Antoinette and Tennessee Ernie Ford.

Some of the alternative artists had been extra reason on social critique. Rob Wynne, for one, embriodered phrase fragments from Jean Genet's perverse play "The Maids" on the lengthy -- and unattended -- educate of a Donna Karan get dressed. Renee Green designed her personal cloth for a nonchalant tableau vivant of a SoHo salon (Her dealer, Pat Hearn is lounging on the couch searching not in contrast to a modern Madame Recamier). But Green's conventional-looking toile de Jouy is without a doubt a prime instance of pictorial revisionism with a Afrocentric subject matter.

Likewise, Elaine Reichek takes ethnography as her premise, and make magnificence and culture the item of her inquires. The vanished -- and clearly reputation-free -- Tierra del Fuego tribesmen whose snap shots appear in Reichek's automated college have shown up oftentimes before in her wide-ranging paintings. Here, within the context of a genteel damask and Darwin's phrases, they form a haunting rejoinder to a group of fashions applauding Ralph Lauren on the end of a display.