LOS ANGELESSusan Cianciolo356 S. Mission Rd. // January 8 – March 13Including work from the 1990s to the present, Cianciolo’s exhibition comprises various examples of the artist’s “kits,” cardboard boxes containing a variety of handmade clothing, notes, sketches, and other collected materials. Arranged both on tables, as they were in Cianciolo’s 1996 presentation at Andrea Rosen in New York, and on an assortment of found wooden pallets laid out evenly along three walls of 356 Mission’s basement gallery, the kits are for the most part displayed closed. Their contents were revealed at the opening by young women dressed in costumes bordering on orientalist—colorful, patterned maxi skirts and headscarves—who meticulously removed each item for public display before placing it back in the kit in precise arrangement.For Cianciolo, the contents of the kits are not outfits but costumes, indicating a performativity central to her approach: the process of getting dressed and displaying oneself is paramount to her work, though especially apparent in those kits containing an actual costume, such as one—packed with pale pink leggings and a patchwork tank top, shiny painted shoes—created for a production of Hamlet. Cianciolo’s personal, craft-based aesthetic also characterizes a full-size kit, in which viewers are invited to sit on a patchwork sleeping bag, shoes off, to watch the video Queens & Kings & Working Class Heroes, 2015, and a selection of the artist’s housewares, on display in the gallery’s upper floor. The work feels deliberately sincere—from the obviously hand-sewn, hand-pasted, and found scraps which compose the kits and the clothing, journals, and trinkets within them; to the inclusion of small notes and marker drawings made by Cianciolo’s daughter and a scrap of quilt made by her mother; to the work’s embrace of a hodgepodge, new-age spirituality, combining elements of Christianity with references to Hindu and Native American spiritual practices. Here, as with the vernissage costumes, her open approach to materials and references sometimes elides the cultural specificity of those materials, despite the care evident in the assemblage and preservation of the works.The exhibition furthers a renewed interest in Ciancolo’s practice, following a solo exhibition at Bridget Donahue last year and her inclusion in this year’s Greater New York at PS1. More broadly, Cianciolo is now acknowledged as a significant precursor for the resurgence of attention to fashion and craft—and specifically to clothing’s textures and materiality, often employing a handmade or haphazard aesthetic—in recent artmaking. Such a tendency is evidenced in the inclusion of clothing lines Eckhaus Latta and Slow and Steady Wins the Race alongside Cianciolo’s work in Greater New York; Zoe Latta of Eckhaus Latta contributed a cloth work, upon which one of Cianciolo’s older kits rests, to the show at 356 Mission. Cianciolo’s engagement with fashion as art, or fashion through the mores of the art world, suggests a more expansive and collaborative engagement with both fields and reasserts the value, if also the limitations, of sincerity as an artistic approach.
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