It chooses You
Adam Denzler
Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp
It Chooses You is a collection of objects circling the drain of tashion. They are presented as a series of bags, gloves, jumpsuits, dresses, and coats in the shape of a menswear collection. The characters behind each look draw from the work of American artist and writer Mike Kelley alongside the visual art of John Waters. These looks come from the world of contemporary American folk culture and popular taste, including a farm boy, ghost, vampire, jock, father, mascot, alien abductee, and hippie. Fashion, as a hierarchical system of taste, burdens one with placing themselves in relation to caricatures and idealizations. The visual references in this collection embody the archetypes unto which we offload our anxieties, all presented as objects of desire in a fashionable context. As the bastards of culture find themselves absorbed into the mainstream, the counterculture commodified into just culture, these objects find themselves referencing silhouettes of the Western fashion canon. The vast majority of materials in this collection was sourced second hand, and all efforts were made to reduce the amount of new material and long distance shipping in the creation of each look. Particularly, the usage of domestic embroideries sourced across Belgium add thousands of hours of unseen and untraceable labor to the objects in this collection.