Dresses As Journals Mixed Media and Writing Exhibit
The touring Dresses Are not currently for sale however dresses can be ordered to fit your own memories and created for you by the artist.
Description of the dresses
The Spiritual Dress
The spiritual dress has drawings I made at the Kriya Yoga Ashram in Homestead Florida in a journal I kept while learning higher levels of meditation. The Kriya Yoga Gurus including the very well know Yogananda are on the bottom of the dress representing the Kriya tradition handed down from the avatar known as Baba Ji to Lahiri Mahashaya. The Saint Ananda Mahi Ma is center stage in the dress as a female powerful saint who is said to be the reincarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga.
Nona
This dress is for my great grandmother who was a performer in the Italian circus. She fell off the horse performing was injured so she could no longer perform and was helped by a man that became her benefactor. The dress has all types of comments that are personal to some of my experiences. My Italian great grandmother and my Italian grandmother were wonderful women. Both came here as immigrants and adjusted to living in this country and raised their children here. Their stories, and songs and food are a huge part of whoI am as an artist.
Palm Beach
As all the dresses are personal journeys this dress is no exception. I was 16 years old before I ever saw Florida and my first introduction was Palm Beach. My close relatives Dr. Charles G. and Josephine Stetson had a winter home in Palm Beach across from the Par 3 Golf Course on A1A. When I was 23 I returned for the entire winter to Palm Beach, played golf, enjoyed the beautiful private beach, and took in the sights including Palm Beach Publix where I could really see the residents of Palm Beach in the 1970’s in all their glory, hence the women at the bottom of this orange dress. Gold shoes and Rose Kennedy Palm Beach had it all.
Empsall’s
This is a very personal dress journal about a department store called Empsall’s that was in Watertown New York, my mother modeled clothing here and she took us to buy our clothing here as children. This building was filled with wonderful shoes, clothing, hats, giant glass counters, and for me as a child it was magical. Empsall’s really fueled my interest as a young adult toward vintage clothing. My mother had purchased a great deal of wonderful dresses, suits, shoes, and bags from the store and modeled them at the store when they had their fashion shows. When I attended the Art Institute of Boson I wore lots of my mothers “vintage” and in my class was Leslie Bogart (Lauren and Humphrey’s daughter who wore Bacall’s vintage. A wonderful memory of art students in Vintage. The buttons on this dress are all vintage and I tried to do this on all the dresses when possible.
The World Without Art is Just “EH’
This dress is less of a Journal and more of a reminder and general statement of the importance of art in our lives. This dress reflects the creative fun side of art, with less written messages and less personal journeys and more expressive color and sculpted characters. The world without art would be terrible since it uplifts us, gives us hope and brings us together. Art has allowed me to reach out to so many people world wide. It is a language we all speak that has the power to create world peace.
The Pink Dress
This dress is more about the written word. I purposely kept this dress very quiet, visually with more writing. The messages are personal in nature. The pink dress represents a dress I was made to wear for photos. I would be outside playing in jeans and t-shirts and I would be transformed into a “girl’ and into the pink scratchy dress which I hated. These dresses were itchy and uncomfortable and you could not play in them and I always felt like I was on display in them. At school we also had to wear dresses even in cold weather and we were always cold in the classrooms. I have no idea who decided that little girls had to wear dresses and could not wear pants when I was in elementary school but it was not allowed for us to wear pants. This dress represents those expectations. I lived in a cold climate where it reached 20 below zero and we still were in cold drafty classrooms in these dresses. We walked to school and put snow pants on over these dresses.