TREE & ILLUSION DRESSES
Illusion Dresses is a series of performances in Park Tabor, Ljubljana for City Of Women Festival Slovenia 2011 http://www.cityofwomen.org/
Three 4 hour durational performances over three days, 7th - 9th October 2011
“Illusion is something which is not true and not false”
Illusion Dresses re-interprets the etymology of “Abracadabra”, meaning “I create as I speak as I heal” and the three durational correlative performances are created as an expansion of “Abracadabra” the theme of 2011 City Of Women Festival. Magic is interpreted as a transformational and transcendent phenomema.
Each Dress-performance was devoted to the functions of creating, speaking and healing in relation to the trees and Tree Dresses installation in Park Tabor.
Tree Dresses is an installation in Park Tabor, Ljubljana,
October - December 2011
Each Tree Dress is dedicated to a lost and missing girl in the world.
The trees in Park Tabor are attired in elegant dresses as if they are girls going out for the night! Some Tree Dresses bear the portrait of a missing girl or woman, whose image has been sourced on missing person websites.
The installation implies an anthropomorphic gathering and celebration of nature and women. The Tree Dresses are enchanting and uncanny; imbuing trees with human qualities invites us to consider nature and botany with respect and equality. We encounter the trees as human-like entities, with a capacity to adorn and revel in their wild beauty. We also consider the plight of missing girls and women, their mysterious disappearances, the relationship between the woods and places of danger, the strange concordance between beauty, longing, death.
The Tree Dresses are also phantom-like appearing like a surprising apparition or a humorous distortion of the senses. They are allegories of the female body, alluding to ideals of truth and beauty.
Allegories of the female form are among the most ubiquitous symbolic images in our culture and according to Marina Warner in Monuments & Maidens, she writes “we cannot escape being what they have made us... for we continue to speak them, see them, make them, live with them, almost unwittingly, as if we did trust the order they construct to hold out some promise conveyed by the bodies of women.” (page xxii Vintage 1996)
Three 4 hour durational performances over three days, 7th - 9th October 2011
“Illusion is something which is not true and not false”
Illusion Dresses re-interprets the etymology of “Abracadabra”, meaning “I create as I speak as I heal” and the three durational correlative performances are created as an expansion of “Abracadabra” the theme of 2011 City Of Women Festival. Magic is interpreted as a transformational and transcendent phenomema.
Each Dress-performance was devoted to the functions of creating, speaking and healing in relation to the trees and Tree Dresses installation in Park Tabor.
Tree Dresses is an installation in Park Tabor, Ljubljana,
October - December 2011
Each Tree Dress is dedicated to a lost and missing girl in the world.
The trees in Park Tabor are attired in elegant dresses as if they are girls going out for the night! Some Tree Dresses bear the portrait of a missing girl or woman, whose image has been sourced on missing person websites.
The installation implies an anthropomorphic gathering and celebration of nature and women. The Tree Dresses are enchanting and uncanny; imbuing trees with human qualities invites us to consider nature and botany with respect and equality. We encounter the trees as human-like entities, with a capacity to adorn and revel in their wild beauty. We also consider the plight of missing girls and women, their mysterious disappearances, the relationship between the woods and places of danger, the strange concordance between beauty, longing, death.
The Tree Dresses are also phantom-like appearing like a surprising apparition or a humorous distortion of the senses. They are allegories of the female body, alluding to ideals of truth and beauty.
Allegories of the female form are among the most ubiquitous symbolic images in our culture and according to Marina Warner in Monuments & Maidens, she writes “we cannot escape being what they have made us... for we continue to speak them, see them, make them, live with them, almost unwittingly, as if we did trust the order they construct to hold out some promise conveyed by the bodies of women.” (page xxii Vintage 1996)
