Dressed Up was conceived while conducting research at the Smithsonian Archives as a Smithsonian Artist-Fellow in 2008. The series consists of full-length photomontage portraits of characters dressed in runway mash-ups drawn from two distinct cultural eras: the 19th Century Victorian and present day hip-hop. The Victorian era, the Age of Empire and colonization, while no longer “in fashion” remains salient in the post-colonial age through remnants of oppressive global, political, and economic structures and systems. In contrast, Hip-hop fashion was originally conceived as part of a performative, radical, social politic in the United States. The attendant music and lifestyle served as powerful platforms from which to challenge entrenched systems of sartorial propriety.
Dressed Up explores symbolic codes of high fashion as imagined by hip-hop avatars and designers of historical haute couture. In bringing the two traditions into direct confrontation, these photomontages play on preconceptions as well as the manner in which we imagine or project personality through dress. The series suggests that the sense of decorum and gravitas conveyed by haute couture/ Victorian fashion belies the colonial violence and decadence of that age; conversely, the near criminalization of hip-hop fashion fails to contend with the humanity of many of its avatars or their status as respectable global citizens.
The Dressed Up series is an irreverent essay on the hybridity and syncretism of contemporary postco- lonial society. The photomontages speak to the unpredictability of the outcome of encounters between the self and its other, between the old and the new, between the normative and the extraordinary.
Marcia Kure
Born in Nigeria, Marcia Kure has had nine one-person shows and over forty exhibitions in Nigeria, Germany, the United States, Spain, the Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Japan, Canada, Austria, and Switzerland. She has exhibited at The New Museum, New York, The Newark Museum, The 7th Sharjah Biennale, the Spelman College Museum, and the 2nd Seville International Biennial curated by Okwui Enwezor. Reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Frieze, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, African Arts and Flash Art. Dressed Up was featured in the recent edition of the art and culture publication Esopus. An exhibition of related works on paper, “Fashionable Hybrids”, will run concurrently at Bravin Lee Projects, NYC.
