LONDON (EJP)---From 20 August until 14 September 2008, the Ben Uri Gallery, in London will present its summer exhibition ‘Schmatte Couture' in partnership with The Rivington Gallery.
A play on words, Schmatte is Yiddish and is a generic term for old and inexpensive clothing and Couture is French and means the opposite - expensive design.
The exhibition explores clothing, fashion and memory – Schmatte and Couture, by way of fantasy, design, nightmare and the un-wearable.
Schmatte Couture’s journey to Rivington Gallery in the East end of London began close to two years ago as artist and curator Sarah Lightman set out to explore fabric’s journey into clothing and the tensions and undercurrents left in the memory of the makers and their families who were regularly immigrants to this country.
She formed a monthly creative “sewing circle” which quickly grew to 16 sculptors, ceramists, photographers, painters and performance artists from Argentina, Israel, Spain, the US and the UK inspiring a wide, disparate yet often synergistic response.
In the exploration of nightmare, Marisol Cavia constructs a seamstress whose workshop has become her semi-dungeon, with huge pins, and a heart-shaped pin cushion that has been stabbed many times.
Childhood is examined in some depth. Roberta Weinstein’s Fantasma draws on the terrors of childhood, with a huge spider hanging from the collar of a sinister party dress.
Ruth Shreiber contrasts “Childhood Remembered” and “Childhood Imagined” the first a grey dress of thin whimsical material representing the unreliability of memories, and the latter, bright and full blown with a yellow hat hanging like the sun on a perfect, but imaginary summers day.
In “Oh Gilda” Sue Cohen reveals how Gilda’s life events become absorbed into her clothing.
Schmatte Couture reminds us Couture, the art of clothes design and the seamstress, was physically adjacent to the Schmatte trade and the sweatshops employing first generation immigrant communities (first Jewish followed by Indian and Bangladeshi) was centred in London’s East End.
The cycles of life are developed and explored in the artists’ sewing, patching and reworking materials. Anita Ceballos embroiders her own self portrait, in ‘Stitched and Patched’ representing the processes of self-construction and repair.
Harold Werner Rubin, director of the Rivington Gallery, was pleased to locate in the East End of London where Jewish tailors and seamstresses plied their trades in the recent past.
His father was a successful clothing manufacturer in Manhattan. Closing his own circle, his maternal family lived inNew York’s Rivington Street about 100 years ago and finding these premises seemed a bit like a homecoming.
The final day of the exhibition, on 14 September, will coincide with the London Fashion Week.
From 20th August until 14 September 2008, Ben Uri Gallery, The London Jewish Museum of Art.
Location: Rivington Gallery, 69 Rivington Street, London EC2A 3AY, Phone: 00 44 (0) 207 729 5090
