Nicole Dextras. Nylon-arm-dress-light, 2010
Some new work from Nicole Dextras. On her website she talks about this winter ephemera series, garments frozen in ice, as an investigation into 'nature’s capacity for stability and its capacity for flux: ice is imbued with this sense of duality, the work questions whether such pairings ultimately exist in symbiosis or in contradiction'.
All garments exist in both symbiosis and contradiction with the body, climate, weather, time. Symbiosis in that we support garments, we are their armature. Contradiction in that garments have all the immanence that has long preoccupied Peter Eisenman. That immanence is autonomous, auto-directed.
Nicole Dextras's deconstructed pieces of clothing never lose their identity, no matter how dispersed they become. Caught in ice, they appear fugitive, but they really aren't. They are surprisingly vivid, even durable.