Alexander Gray Associates presented a project by artist and fashion designer J. Morgan Puett. Based on Puett’s concept of “workstyles”, an integrative approach to artmaking, lifestyle, sustainability, and industrial life, the project activated the gallery as a hybridized exhibition and studio space, convening mechanism and showroom.
In the gallery space, Puett installed a moving platform of burnt wood and steel, on which a tableau of personal artifacts and research materials are gathered: books, sewing machines, measuring tools, antique textiles, benches, chairs, shelves and surfaces. Within this dynamic apparatus, Puett conducted research and dialogue with invited participants from a range of fields including artists, designers, performers, scientists, academics, business leaders and journalists. The installation change daily, as emotions, stories, objects and texts were considered and arranged by Puett and the participants; this approach reflects Puett’s commitment to community activity, shared experience, and exchanged labor.
Conversations took place within this architecture will inform Puett’s on-going investigations on the history and changing frameworks of fashion and retail; the result, at the end of the gallery presentation, will be a new clothing system, patterns for these clothes, and fabric-based artworks incorporating algorithms developed in the process. This evolving project will take place at the Queens Museum of Art with support from the Smithsonian Institution’s Artist Research Fellowship Program.
