Potential, by Tara O’Brien
It’s hard to believe Paper Dresses will only be up for two more weeks! The past month and a half has flown by, if you haven’t had a chance to see the exhibit, please stop by before December 1st when we change exhibits.
This week’s featured artists are PRESS founder Melanie Mowinski and Tara O’Brien, whose work PRESS featured last fall.
We love Tara’s delicate origami dress, and the amazing pearl necklace she constructed. Tara’s attention to detail inspires and amazes. The dress, entitled, “Potential” juxtaposes what was deemed as a successful women of the 1940s and 1950s,”…a good wife, always smiling, never raising her voice or causing problems. Able to run a vacuum, wash dishes and cook a six course meal every night, all in a full-skirted dress, heals and a string of pearls with what might be in that woman’s heart, a physical freedom, our prim and proper 1950’s lady did not have.
Melanie’s box of origami dresses is currently on tour at Pyramid Atlantic‘s “Outside the Margin” exhibit. The book object is a box of origami dresses with different quotes ranging from text from the 19th Amendment and Title IX to statements and tweets from current events related to violence against women and children and how the NFL has handled it. This piece was directly inspired by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky as well as email conversations with Kristen Leslie, one of her former professors from when she was at Yale University.
A variation of this box of dresses is also on view at Shakespeare and Co. during the run of WAM’s (Women’s Action Movement) production of In Darfur, which was the result of playwright Winter Miller’s work as researcher for The New York Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristof during the genocide in Darfur.
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