Tobi Clark was the recipient of the Sofitel / Craft FRESH! Emerging Craft Practitioners Award in 2008.  The award includes the opportunity for the winning artist to exhibit new work at Sofitel Melbourne On Collins in the following year.

 

Some words on the installation.

:acute is an experiment investigating the relationship between fashion objects and mirrors. Deliberately avoiding signs of the human body :acute transforms garments into strange, living sculptures via a self-contained, confused, domestically fantastical scenario. Acting as an uncanny interference, the mirror platform is instrumental in altering, dislocating, flattening and repeating the arrangement within it. No order and little clarity prevail inside this combination of mirrors. The result is a complicated clash of visual perceptions designed to unhinge an audiences’ experience of objects.

 

Some words on the complexities of mirrors.

Despite the ever-presence and awareness of its mechanisms it is fascinating to find in the modern era that the mirror remains an object cloaked in ambiguity, mystery and possibility. Riddled with contradictions the mirror simultaneously reduces and extends space, clarifies and confuses objects. The mirror flattens our anticipated three dimensional reality into a two dimensional image while at the same time shifting that which is reflected to another location. This suggestion of a parallel world lying beneath the reflective surface (perhaps with three or more dimensions) is a beautiful concept because it is strictly determined by each individual viewer. [1]

 

Some words on the garments

The garments are the outcome of a specific construction method involving existing garments and a grid system. The grid simultaneously acts as an intervention to dismantle existing garments (which are flattened into two dimensional objects) as well as a template to put the garments back together.

Fabrications; linen, synthetic organza and tyvek.  All fabrication is prepared by hand using household goods and tailoring materials.

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Tobia is a graduate of RMIT Bachelor of Design (Fashion)

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Reference

 

1. Haley SJ, Mirror as Metasign: Contemporary Culture as Mirror World, University of Melbourne,  Melbourne, 2005

 2. Shapire G, Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel, University of California Press, California, 1995  

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