Engages,

Dolci & Kabbana, Hugh Westland, Adele Varcoe, Blake Barns, Matthew Benjamin, Jeanne Hendrey Brand Delusions: The Launch

Presented by Dolci & Kabana (Ricarda Bigolin & Nella Themelios) with collaborator Simon Browne and featuring Bernadette Corporation’s,
Hell Frozen Over, 2000 (Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York).

Come and celebrate the face that launches a brand as well as a series of other launches by artists working in the ambiguous terrain between fashion, art, commerce, desire.

The Launch Program

3.00 pm: Alcohol, cake and sausage service

3.15 pm: Dolci & Kabbana, “Faces” and The Face

3.30 pm: Chorus, Coming Soon!?

3.45 pm: Hugh Westland, Sebastian Pflaum

4.00 pm: Adele Varcoe, No Light vs NoWEAR

4.15 pm: Blake Barns, making her appear is the
same as making her disappear – just backwards

4.30 pm: Matthew Benjamin, Staircase Humor

4.45 pm: Jeanne Hendrey, Fresh, Fly, Wild & Bold

5.00 pm: Alcohol, cake and sausage service

Dolci & Kabana: Brand Delusions is the inaugural public outing of the newly constituted collaborative entity Dolci & Kabana: a fashion brand in search of an identity. The fashion persona and the fashion brand are increasingly and more intricately conflated in current market cultures. The lack of distinction between a person, brand, company, design house and corporation reveals the increased over-capitalisation of fashion, and the way a persona can be represented in a variety of different formats: a typographic identity, a glossy advertorial, a black & white bio pic, or a twitter feed. Dolci & Kabana: Brand Delusions wilfully exploits the ambiguity proffered in the entity of a ‘brand’, using the exhibition framework as just one more in a series of branding statements and allusions. Subsequently the edges between work, branding, art, life style and PR are deliberately made ambiguous.

Screening as part of the project is Bernadette Corporation’s ‘fashion film’ Hell Frozen Over. The film references the 19th century poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who notably produced a fictional fashion magazine La Dernière Mode under a variety of pseudonyms. The project also includes a live link to the twitter feed of Choupette – Karl Lagerfeld’s cat, a launch night and a number of associated events. The project indulges the limits and formats of a corporate identity, embracing the smoke and mirrors, chiaroscuro and surfaces that veil the blankness and impermanence of corporate strategy and the multiple formats of a brand name.

Dolci & Kabana, (a banal word play of) a famous Italian fashion brand, big business, deli, catering, cake and sausage. Directed by Ricarda Bigolin & Nella Themelios, Dolci & Kabana operates amorphously between the fields of art, design, and fashion, subsuming the enterprise within the aspirations of a fashion business. The collective intends to produce and direct a variety of projects including ‘artworks’, fashion items, events and spaces.