Interesting People

Donald at the Slash ShowI was in the city the other day with a couple of fiber friends to see the Slash show at the Museum of Arts and Design. While we were getting organized to go in I noticed a woman fiddling with some wool so I asked her if she was knitting or Crocheting. She said she was knitting. We struck up a conversation about textiles and as we were taking a man walked up in the most outrageous outfits I've seen in quite some time. He ended up being her husband so she introduced us. I was so taken by his outfit that I had to ask him if I could take a picture. Of course he agreed (who wouldn't when they take that much time to choose their outfit) and posed as if he was used to the request. As you can see he was quite the Beau Brummel in his chenille blazer and pieced shirt. We had quite a wonderful conversation about fibers, fashion and piecework. New York City, you never know what you will see.

The show itself was all about using paper as the media of choice. There were paintings, collages, sculpture and videos all relating to paper. The video was quite amusing. It was a stop action piece relating modernist architecture to Gothic buildings. The artist started with a modern building and turned it into a Gothic masterpiece by "covering" the walls with paper cutouts of crenelation, stained glass windows and towers. As the pieces went into place you heard the sound of heavy objects moving into place as if the paper was, in fact, stone, brick and steel. The juxtaposition of paper and sound gave the piece an ironic edge that was priceless.

We were also lucky to see work by artists like Judy Pfaff and Kara Walker. There were paper topographical maps, cut outs on the windows and walls that made great use of both positive and negative space and some fascinating sculpture like the nude male figure with its magazine cut out body parts. All in all a very fun show.

Later in the day we stopped at the MoMA bookstore (we were too late for the show) an browsed for quite some time. Again I had to take my camera out to capture another wonderful fashion statement, this time a great hat. I don't know about you but I would definitely wear this hat.