In yesterday's post we looked at Leonora Carrington and highlighted contemporary artists and designers drawing inspiration from her, including Bárbara Sánchez Kane. Today, let's explore a recent project by Sánchez Kane currently showcased at the 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice (until 24th November).
Sánchez Kane is an intriguing figure for all the fashion design students ouy there because she is an artist and a fashion designer as well, disenchanted with the industry's demands.
Born in 1987 in Mérida, the capital of tropical Yucatán, Sánchez Kane first got a degree in industrial engineering, then, at 22, she moved onto fashion and studied fashion at Polimoda in Florence, Italy.
She launched her eponymous label in 2016, but soon discovered that the relentless pace of the fashion industry clashed with her methodical approach and passion for exploration and research. Feeling that in the world of art, failure is a stepping stone in the discovery process, while in fashion the pressure to succeed is unrelenting, Sánchez Kane decided not to abandon fashion entirely, but reimagined it as a medium for her artistic projects.
Based in Mexico City, she continued to create fashion pieces available to buy from her online shop, while also developing an art dialogue intertwined with fashion.
In her practice, art and fashion are inseparable, just like fashion and engineering. Sánchez Kane frequently incorporates hard materials such as leather and employs metalwork techniques in her art and fashion installations. Her background in engineering is evident in her tailoring: jackets and shirts are often strategically slashed, deconstructed, and reconstructed to create innovative proportions, motifs or sculptural forms.
Her installations often feature designs and garments imbued with symbolic meanings, which also transform into costumes for performances exploring surrealism, absurdity, chaos, sexuality, and gender fluidity. Her experiments with masculine-feminine juxtapositions have led to creations like a corset made of vinyl boxing gloves; shoes with tiny supermarket shopping carts for heels point instead at consumerism, while one of her most iconic designs is the pink leather "mamado" suit ("Las Puertas del Sentimentalismo" collection, Fall 2019; View this photo), inspired by the bulging bodies of male bodybuilders and featuring embossed designs from traditional Mexican pottery (the suit was acquired by the Museum at FIT in New York, and was part of the exhibition "¡Moda Hoy! Latin American and Latinx Fashion Design Today").
Another of her art and fashion iconic pieces is a heavy green lambskin leather suit, pressed into the shape of an egg carton with a smiling metal egg in one slot - an amusing take on military uniforms. Military uniforms are also the protagonists of her installation at the Venice Biennale.
Here Bárbara Sánchez Kane presents a new iteration of her 2021 irreverent project, "Prêt-à-Patria", originally showcased at the group exhibition "Siembra" at kurimanzutto in Mexico City. The title cleverly merges the French term for ready-to-wear fashion (prêt-à-porter) with the Spanish word for homeland (patria).
The installation in the Arsenale features three mannequins dressed in military uniforms, forming a human tower. Typically, military uniforms erase the wearer's identity, transforming them into an indistinguishable part of a unit. However, here, something is amiss: the gleaming buttons of the uniforms are coins displaying the Mexican national emblem, but with pierced holes rendering them worthless.
Adding to the absurdity, the mannequins sport military caps exaggerated to comic and phallic proportions, and their boots, instead of featuring metal tips, are made from boxing gloves that make them look like clown shoes, something that effectively "deactivates" them. This comical alteration prevents indeed the boots from being used violently, to stomp maybe on someone's face - an act associated with soldiers from a military dictatorship. The mannequins also wear a strap-on with a measuring tape instead of a dildo, symbolically sizing up the wearer.
Turning around the mannequins you discover that the uniforms are cut away to reveal lacy feminine red lingerie underneath. This unexpected revelation allows Sánchez Kane to subvert the stability and rigidity typically associated with military attire, adding layers of commentary on identity, gender, and power.
Suddenly, the violence and nationalism are erased as the fabric parts like a curtain to reveal an almost obscene and lewd secret. This transformation turns the neutrality of the military uniform into something libidinous, ridiculing Mexican nationalism and military power. It dismantles violent indoctrination of identities, disarming and detoxifying masculinity, and questioning domination within a hegemonic masculine society. In this way, gender and national identity intertwine in this sartorially based, queer-inflected artwork.
Further symbolism lies in the perfectly crafted bodies in uniform, whose shiny gold bodies reflect the distorted, grotesque images of visitors, absorbing them into the mannequins.
The installation is also accompanied by a performance featuring a military band marching around the Arsenale, paying respect to the sculpture as if it were a flagpole. The main inspiration for the configuration of the mannequins is indeed the Escolta de Bandera (Flag Escort), a military ritual of safeguarding and honoring the national flag in Mexico.
Like Leonora Carrington, Sánchez Kane has made Mexico City her home and creative hub. While she doesn't directly reference Carrington in her visual imagery, the connection lies in her experimentation across different mediums and in her rebellious spirit within a gender-fluid world. Who knows, maybe one day, like Carrington, Sánchez Kane will extend her creativity to theater or even ballet, designing sets and costumes and continuing her journey of artistic exploration and defiance on the stage.
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