Sandra Backlund

Sandra Backlund is a a fashion designer from Sweden.  Backlund graduated from Beckman's College of Design in 2004 and started her own design label the same year.  I enjoy Sandra Backlund's work because of the way it morphs and shifts the slim female body that wears her work.  Although her work is mostly knit wear, the fiber becomes architectural, bulbous and exaggerated yet remains absolutely chic.

Backlund has become known for her signature knitting techniques, which Backlund completes by hand, entirely on her own (the only exception being her Fall/Winter 2009-10 to Spring/Summer 2011 collections where she worked with Italian manufactures in order to experiment with coupling machine-led processes).  Working between machine knitting and finishing pieces by hand, Backlund's experimentation with knitting processes are exciting and push the boundaries of the traditional sweater.

I also appreciate that Backlund views each of her pieces as individual works of art.  She often documents her garments off of the body as art objects, which yields great forms and unusual views of the pieces.  Backlund admits to working more like a sculpture than a traditional designer, "I improvise on a tailor's dummy or on myself to discover ideas of shapes or silhouettes that I could never come to think about in my head." I love the way her sculptural discoveries transform thin and slight models into powerful, obscure and often frightening creatures.

I was reminded of how much of love Backlund's work, when I visited The Art Institute of Chicago last week and discovered her work on display.  Fashioning the Object is a temporary exhibition on display at the Art Institute until September 13th.  I HIGHLY RECOMMEND it.  Backlund is one of three design houses included in the exhibit, along with Bless and Boudicca.  A very exciting show and there is a great little catalog you can take away with you.

Ana Mendieta

video still "Body Tracks"

1982

Ana Mendieta was a cuban-born performance artist, sculptor, video artist and painter who immigrated to the US when she was only 12 in order to escape Castro's regime.  Mendieta struggled with issues of place and belonging and her work delt with these issues as well as themes of feminism, gender, violence, life and death. 

Mendieta lived to be only 37.  In September of 1985, Mendieta died from a fall from her 34th floor Greenwich Village apartment in New York, after an argument with her husband of only eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre.  Andre was tried and acquitted of second-degree murder, although close friends of Mendieta, like the American visual artist Carolee Schneeman, argued Mendieta's death was not suicide.

Two of Mendieta's most iconinc series are her Silueta Series and her Body Tracks Series. 

In the Silueta Series, Mendieta placed her nude body into a natural scene, painted her body to mimic the natural scene and placed herself there, left an ephemeral silhouette of her body in the earth, or sculpted/drew the image of a female form into nature, which would wear away with time.

 Untitled (Grass on Woman)

1972

 Tree of Life Series

1973-1980

Untitled drawing in sand

1970s

Silueta Series in Mexico

1973-1978

One of her most powerful pieces is from her early performance career while she was attending the University of Iowa.  There was a woman who was raped and murdered on the Iowa campus and Mendieta responded with protest to the way the school's administration chose to handle the situation (hush, hush and hopefully it will go away) by staging an image of what the scene might look like.

Unititled (Rape Scene)

1973

Friends and fellow students were invited to her apartment. Upon arriving they found Mendieta stretched across a table and tied up, half nude and covered in blood.  In this way Mendieta was attempting to "name" rape, to create an image of it and to avoid allowing rape to be overlooked.

The use of blood in Mendieta's work is very important and linked to her childhood development in Cuba, where she was raised under the religion of Santeria, which commonly employs rituals of animal sacrifice, exposing Mendieta to the power of blood from an early age.

Unititled

Body Tracks Series

1974

stretched out and tied up - her almost-nude body smeared in blo

I was at the Art Institute of Chicago last night and currently on display are a nice collection of photographs and drawings from the Silueta Series, as well as one Silueta Series video and one Body Tracks video until January 15th, 2012.  Diane and Bruce Hall currently own these works and will be handing the work off to the Art Institute in the future, making this the largest collection of Mendieta's work to be owned by any one museum.  THANK YOU!  Very exciting that Mendieta's work will be so close.  I look forward to going back and seeing it again and again.