Dress Book: Angel

Artist, writer, editor, teacher, Mira Schor work at the intersection of language and painting. As an American artist, she has a unique and singular place in the contemporary art scene through her dual commitment, both visual and intellectual.

Made from rice paper, these three dresses each has a story to tell; they are embodied as fragile, floating presences that remind viewers of their own contingent condition. These works stem from a fascination with how fashion attempts to shape femininity, an intriguing and elusive notion that can be worn or taken off. The vulnerability of materials is part of the artistic ethos of the 70s, where experimentation with materials goes together with feminist political research.

Like books, the two dresses, Dress Book: Angel and Dress, are made up of different pages, and appear before our eyes like palimpsests (a manuscript bearing traces of previous inscriptions). As for the fragments that make up Dress: Crazy Lady, they are held together by the mere presence of pins, pushing the fragility of the human figure and the work of art to its very limits. Clothes and faces, which play a large part in defining women's identity in our society, are here profoundly and freely questioned by the artist through her masks and dresses. These elements reveal a use of language that is at once personal, autobiographical, poetic, and resolutely feminist.

This work was first shown by the Pinault Collection in 2023 in Mira Schor exhibition « Moon Room », Bourse de Commerce, Paris.