Project Description
"Fast Fashion" will be an installation work about the obsession with buying cheap clothes and going through them so quickly. We often don't think about the impact fast fashion has on the environment, but clothes don't deteriorate very quickly in landfills and the amount of fossil fuels burned to create the cheaply made garments is large, as well. There is also the human rights issue in developing nations where cheap labor and poor working conditions have been gaining attention from activists, but there is still so much to be done.
The installation will involve a double clothes line hung up between the wall and an eight foot tall wooden beam meeting at a 90 degree angle in the corner parallel to the corner of the walls. T-shirts, jackets, jeans, shorts, and even socks and underwear will be hung up on twine in two stacked rows. The projection will be from the front of the beam on to the specific clothing pieces. The videos will be of different negative parts of the environment such as litter in the road, dirty water, fire burning, smoke clouds, over flowing trash bins.
The juxtaposition of such everyday items as t-shirts and jeans against the nasty things infiltrating our natural world will call the viewer to have to interrogate why these two are put together. The two are inherently tied to one another, but we often don't think about what goes into making our clothes or what happens to them when we throw them out.
Supplies
Jeans
Shorts
T-Shirts
Jackets
One 8-foot wooden 4x4 beam
Twine
Clothes Pins
Command Strips (To Connect Twine to Wall and Beam)
Projector
DSLR Camera and SD card
1Tb Hard Drive
MadMapper Program
Adobe Premiere Pro
Timeline
February 12, 2019: Proposal Turned In
February 19, 2019: Video Shot and Supplies Gathered
February 21, 2019: Installed in MadMapper
February 22-26, 2019: Practice Projection and Installation
February 28, 2019: Installation
Project Update 2/19
After proposing my idea last week and thinking more about how the viewer can interact with the piece I've decided to change my layout a little bit. I'll be using the rafters in the Black Box to string the clothesline into a curved triangle shape within a corner of the BlackBox to create an "entrance" into the space. In the interior will be three large piles of clothes on the floor and the projector facing the entrance of the interior. The projection will then be on the piles of clothes and the clothes hanging on the line, but only on the interior of the space as the viewer is forced to walk around and enter the space to see the projection.
Project Update 2/26
I had the intention of recording this pile of trash and junk involving clothes and furniture behind my gym. I wanted to record it Wednesday afternoon at dusk, and someone had come cleaned up the trash after it being there for a month. So, lesson learned, you should always record the second you think about something cause life happens. We're going to stage the trash scene, but it will work. Now, we have all of our material together and we can begin editing for MadMapper.
Project Update 2/28
Today, we went into the BlackBox to set up and take measurements to prep for critique on Tuesday. However, my game plan for how to set up the clothes line in a "tent" fashion inviting the viewer in to the space did not work, due to physics and gravity and weight of clothing to the clothes pins (see picture below). So, I came up with the alternate solution of using the space by tying the rope to the spiral staircase and throwing the other half through the rafters and weighing it down with sand bags.
#EPICFAIL
Fast Fashion
Fast Fashion is intended to bring to the forefront the environmental and human rights issues that our capitalistic obsession with cheaply made "fashionable" clothes has done to our society. The projections are loops of children in India working in clothing mills, a fiery pit, litter, a dog taking a shit, and televisions and furniture on the side of the road. There is one scene projected on the jeans of the Appalachian Mountains to juxtapose the ugly to the beauty, and I deliberately put that on the ripped jeans to further the contradiction of the imperfect and the perfect. I put the piece facing the corner of the room, forcing the viewers to crowd around and really interrogate the images, almost as if they're trapped. The purpose was for the viewer to be confronted with their hand in the fast fashion epidemic. I hope this piece allows for the viewer to think and further interrogate their shopping choices, and how they dispose of their clothes.