WORD
ON THE STREET
by Holiday Dmitri
The Booster - Wicker Park
July 10, 2002
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WORD
ON THE STREET |
I am an excitable person by nature, and when I discover something worth exciting me, the condition only intensifies. As many a friend can attest, when excited I am inclined to speak hastily and scramble to convert thoughts made into words that spew from my mouth like an abrupt volcano upsurge. Thankfully, this spiel goes in print. For, what I have to say about fashion artist Cat Chow excites me. Her crafty deeds and nonsensical aesthetics rev me up. Much of the media hail her an avant-garde fashion designer. She says she thinks of herself as an artist. Really, she is both. Chow transforms alternative materials into whimsical clothing wear. She gives meaning to the absurd: Band-aids, glass vials, stained wine corks, Power Ranger hologram trading cards, 35-mm slides, sand paper and rubber baby-bottle nipples are some of the everyday objects she transforms into "fabric." She fashions form into function, manipulating uncommon or found objects into one-of-a-kind dresses. "It's a step-up from what fashion is today," says Chow, 29, whose sculptural attire is influenced by designer Paco Rabanne's chain mail dresses from the '60s. "I think I've taken it to a whole new level though, where I'm not just connecting pieces, but I'm weaving it all in with patterns." Chow, now a fashion design teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, began in 1991 at Northwestern University as Catherine Chow, a math-oriented student from Glen Rock, N.J. Coming in, her sense of style was limited by the uniforms she wore in her parochial school and a stint on the production line at a jewelry factory. It was at school that Chow discovered her passion, and switched from the Mathematical Methods and Social Sciences Program to study theater with a concentration in costume design. Then and there she became Cat Chow. During that time, Chow learned the technique she now uses to assemble her chosen material. While apprenticing at Chained Lynx, a store selling chain mail, in downtown Evanston, she learned how to join chain mail into metal links, as used in the garments worn under armor in the medieval days. Her first piece -- an all-metal chain mail vest attached with mini-blinds on the bottom -- came together in 1993. In 2000, Chow won the Avant Garde Design Vision Award in New York's Gen Art Styles International Design Competition for her zipper dress, a strapless evening gown consisting entirely of one 100-yard zipper. The panel of judges in that competition included fashion luminaries such as Todd Oldham, Kate Spade, Patricia Field and Randolph Duke. Though her work has appeared in more than 25 fashion shows and art galleries throughout Chicago and New York, material evidence if anything of her talent and success, Chow remains humble. She exudes a quiet confidence, living naturally with a total commitment to her powers of invention and a complete loss of herself in her materials. " When I make my dresses, I try to find materials that excite me and challenge me," Chow says. "I think it's interesting that I take these objects that have 'hard' connotations and soften them up. It changes how you might view them. Even the heavy metal one -- some people say it's sensual. You don't see that 'hardness' to it; it curves. I like to say it's one-of-a-kind clothing that challenges the boundaries of fashion." She took on her latest project based on feeling, perhaps inchoate, of making a dress from newspaper. It took on another form though when Chow was trying to get financial backing, got it, and thought about attaching a social message to the piece. "I wanted to address the value of money," she says. "What is it worth? A thousand dollars is a lot of money to one person, but $1 is just throwaway cash to many. "I could have done it with my grant award, but I felt guilty about cutting up my own money," says Chow, who had received a large grant from the Illinois Arts Council this year. "But I thought to myself, 'I think I know a thousand people who would give me a dollar.'" It took a month, but she came up with a thousand bucks in singles. The bills were shredded to 25 strips, then turned into paper rings, and assembled in a chain mail pattern. The piece, entitled "Not For Sale," which she is still finishing, was shown at Art Chicago. "The gallery that represented me wanted me to sell, but I wanted to hold off," says the fashion artist. "I'm glad I don't need to rely on my work for money, because I can't think in those terms at all." Side
Note: Cat Chow will be exhibiting some of her pieces August 2-29
at Women Made Gallery, 1900 S. Prairie Avenue. For more information, visit
http://www.womanmade.org or call
the gallery at (312) 328-0038. |
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