ANN VERONICA JANSSENS
In an interview, she once said that we don’t actually look at colour, but that colour is within us, as an experience; and she usually tries to explore this idea in her work, showing that our views about reality and perception are fragile and unstable. Thinking about that, I narrowed my research to movies in the superhero genre, just because they tend to evoke quite intense feelings in their audience and, from that, I went into exploring how superheroes and their villain counterparts are, in terms of how they use colour, clearly delimitated into primary vs secondary. The idea that colour is so engrained into an experience to the point where we do not really perceive it, but we react to it, is what I want to explore in my project.
REI KAWAKUBO
While looking through the online libraries of various museums from across the world, I decided to check out what The Metropolitan Museum of Art had to offer. That is when I found Comme des Garçons Art of the In-Between (2017). Truth be told, I merely looked because of my interest in fashion, but, once I started reading about the collection, I was surprised to notice that it played with the same notion I was researching, only in a different way.
The collection aims to redefine traditional aesthetics and blur the boundaries between what the fashion industry considers conventional definitions of gender, age or culture. Some concepts explored are Self/Other, Subject/Object, Male/Female, Child/Adult - I find that these ones, in particular, are pertinent to my research, as the designer is trying to explore what she calls hybrid identities. Kawakubo wants to highlight the existence of different aspects of the self in one individual and she does so by creating a collection that acts as a bridge between them.
I discovered this exhibit after the lockdown happened and, in a way, it helped in showing me that there is more than one way to explore my idea. Getting inspired by it, I drew a few superhero outlines and I created their outfits from multi-coloured flower petals - trying to create a contrast between good and evil.
