Ari Fish
Ari Fish listens to the muses. Walking down 18th Street in Kansas City a few years ago, I was transfixed by two oversized, overstuffed handbags in a shop window. These muscle bags, as I called them, were puffy, quilted, bulbous forms; one black and one red, they both incorporated what I now recognize to be Fish’s characteristic grid motif, with confident lines and hems, in places double or quadruple stitched. I was covetous of these woven sacks of hyper-stylized sinews, and I had a feeling of strange, resonant beauty that was also deeply familiar. I know now that this is exactly what Fish seeks to achieve in her work. She’s not so much interested in the high art object or fashion piece – rather, she wants to create a visceral experience and open a door to a psychic place of reckoning. This, Fish argues, is not to be found in the static or fixed. As she says, “It’s all meta,” whether her work is placed on a clothing rack, displayed in a glass case, or – ideally for Fish – worn on the body. Wearing one of her garments is like recognizing oneself in a photo – at once familiar and strange. As she said during one of our studio visits, “I want my clothes to remind you of how it felt to wear your favorite shirt when you were five.”
Fish tailors her clothing to the determined or intuited conceptual needs of a project or collaboration. Whether Fish is designing clothes to reflect the narrative of Peaches’ “I Feel Cream” 2009 Tour, or the extemporaneous stage choreography of Cody Critcheloe in a SSION concert, the garb is intended to reflect the movement and feeling of the wearer. Fish’s style borrows and extrapolates from feminist design a la Lucy Orta, Rei Kawakubo’s “like some boys” a.k.a. Comme des Garçons designs and guerrilla store antics, and Yoko Ono’s Fluxus games; punk and DIY culture recalling David Bowie’s evolutions of persona and Kim Gordon’s oscillations between music, fashion and art; occult symbolism and ritual garb evocative of the Tarot and the Knights Templar; Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain surrealist players; and The Labyrinth’s Muppeted cast. As part of the collective Carnal Torpor, Fish has constructed sensorial art provocations and experiences based on manifestoes and cultural diagrams; installations with taste, smell, and touch; and costumes and accoutrement for conjuring ritualistic experience. In Fish’s revelry, designing a space for feeling is a multi-dimensional operation; a spiritual service; the work of making one’s life habitable and aesthetic, yet perceptive and challenging.
Fish’s Native America and Warrior Wear collections offer modular outfits that are adaptable and androgynous. Earlier this year, Fish created an intimate two-person robe for an exhibition in Brooklyn, NY called speak and spell of which her CSF exhibition piece is a continuation. Participants share a silk veil that drapes between their foreheads as they sit facing each other. When showing this piece, Fish occupies one half of the robe, assuming the role of designer and Tarot Reader, and an audience member/querent joins her in the other half. Together they wear the garment as equals – an entry into a sacred space within a gallery setting. Works such as this flout the model of assembly line, ready-to-wear attire, emphasizing instead a personal environment conducive to focus and feeling. Fish designs experiential situations with clothing and costume intended to inspire a change in perspective. Using fashion as a form of self-expression and psychological reorientation, Fish hopes to offer her audience the conditions for channeling one’s energy and a chance for empowerment.
From Essay by Lacey Wozny, Assistant Director, Grand Arts, July 2010.
