Elegant Idiosyncrasy

For the past 6-7 weeks I have been working on ways to present essentially what I am talking about here on the blog in a fine art gallery so I can graduate in December with my fine art degree. At the end of last spring semester I presented to my school faculty my blog as my art work and although they liked the idea of the blog they did not like the idea of a blog in a gallery. For that reason I have been beating my head against a brick wall trying to come up with different installation ideas and this very intense collage you see below is what my latest creation is.

To give you a brief outline of what is happening here in this installation I am creating an anthropological collection of found items, video and photo documentation of the synesthetic experiences that I have on a day to day basis that result in the way that I dress myself and ultimately create and express my identity. In today's culture every individual is like a walking collage or artwork of found items, similar to a contemporary art installation. Here I have created a contemporary art installation that examines the understanding of my own identity that I expressed through my outfit on one particular day. Projected on top of this massive collage representing the inspiration and influences behind this one outfit is a video of me getting dressed in that exact same outfit.

This video is just one snippet of the installation as I was not able to get a steady shot of the full piece since I had forgotten to bring my tripod with me that day. I definitely feel like this is something you have to experience in person but I thought it would only be fair to share what I have been working on for school and graduation and would love to hear anyone's feedback if there is any to give. Other than the lack lusting video there are some close-up's of bits and pieces of the installation below. I hope you all enjoy.

The other day I was showing a friend my old sketchbook and I randomly came across this page I had collaged years ago and fell in love with it all over again. No one else seem's to really like this page but that's always the case when you just LOVE a photo and then no one reacts to it but the photo you dislike the most everyone obsesses over. Whatever. This layout really inspired me and got me thinking about skin and the body.

Within 24 hours of that I was extremely exhausted after photographing the previously mentioned friend but for no reason what so ever started taking some photos with my phone of my bones, shoulder blades, neck and skin in these twisted and contorted ways. I posted some of these photos on instagram and was really surprised to see the amount of positive feedback I got from them. This got me really obsessed with skin and the body and the same friend had left this beautiful nude leotard at my place so the next morning I decided to wear it for my outfit and snap some photos that were inspired by all of these experiences.

Coming from a dance background I have always been extremely interested in the body. The way it moves naturally and unnaturally as dance is certainly not all about natural movements despite it's goal to make it all look natural. The same goes for modeling and essentially the way that we behave as individuals. Our gestures, movements and interactions with people are all learned from our parents, peers, movies, images and so forth. Who we are is natural and unnatural; we are socially constructed creatures with innate instincts that lie beneath. There is something about the skin and bones though and the way they move with each other that is so enticing to me. It can be contorted, anxious, uncomfortable, grotesque and yet also beautiful, succulent, strong and empowering. The body and me are far from threw with each other, this is just the beginning of a very beautiful relationship.

A few weekend's ago I photographed a second look book for the body jewelry line Goddess Gear. This time the vibe was completely different. We used the designer's two beautiful family member's, Alena and Sasha, as the models and went to Nikki Beach for a more lifestyle beach/sexy essence. Makeup artist Mairelys Alfonso assisted us and did an absolutely stunning job while also being such a trooper walking all around the beach with us as I had decided that I wanted to shoot "in the moment" as I scouted for how the setting sun was interacting with the location. If you are interested in purchasing your own body jewelry piece you can click here to inquire more about how to get one custom made for you.

These are some extra shots that don't really show off the jewelry but I just love them too much to not share.

This coming week I am going to be taking a break from the blog to go on my last relaxing vacation before I start my final semester of college. I'll be going back home to Savannah, Georgia and you can expect to see a ridiculous amount of pictures in the upcoming weeks but for now I thought I would show you a ridiculous amount of pictures from my summer thus far. Obviously this is just a small compilation of the photos I've been taking all summer but consider it a taste of what I've been looking at these past 3 months. Enjoy and see you all in a week!

I am so excited to announce that I will be in my first ever gallery show one week from today!!! A few months ago I came across the group RAW Artists and was extremely impressed by their coalition and support for artists of all mediums. When I say all mediums I literally mean all mediums: photography, painting, sculpting, performance art, musicians, fashion designers, make-up artists, hair dressers, body painters so on and so forth. If you have been following this blog for awhile now then you know how much I have struggled with support from my school with the type of art that I am creating. It has one foot in the door of fashion and another foot in the door of art and for some reason that makes my fine art school very nervous and unsure of whether to accept it as "real art". When I saw how RAW Artists supports all facets of artists I knew that I wanted to be a part of their organization in any way that I could. Thus my reason for submitting a few of my photos and a quick biography of who I am, what I do and what I hope to do in the future to them and next thing I know I am getting a phone call from the coordinator asking if I would want to be featured in their next show in Miami. Of course I screamed ~~a little~~ a lot and said yes wholeheartedly and now one week from today I will have my photos hanging in a major art gallery in Miami with amazing artists surrounding me and the opportunity to showcase my work to people who can open up new doors for me.

With all that said I would also like to share that in order for me to be a part of this show I have to pay a certain amount to cover my space in the exhibition and can do that by selling tickets to the show. Up until this Monday you can buy tickets for $15, otherwise you will have to wait in line at the door and pay $20 to get into the event. I know from my college-budget stand point that $15 can be a lot and not everyone has money to be throwing around like that but from an artists stand point I would be more than ever appreciative if you, my readers and supporters and people that make me feel not so alone and strange and weird could support me by buying a ticket so I don't have to pay for my spot out of pocket. It is only $15 and it is going towards a great cause. Even if you aren't in town or can go to the show I will be willing to send you any print of my photos that you would like if you buy a ticket before Monday. All you have to do is send me an email at ashleyggarner1@gmail.com letting me know you bought a ticket and I'll send you an 8x10 print of any photo you would like of mine. Below is an example of the type of work that I will be showing. You can purchase a ticket here. If you have any questions please feel free to comment on this post or email me, I'm a quick responder. I hope that you all can support me and even more so I hope that some of you can actually make it out the show so I can meet you!

It has been 10 days that I have withheld myself from blogging and I'm not going to lie to you guys, I missed it terribly. So terribly that last night I even had a dream about me organizing and brainstorming blog post ideas. That could either mean that I might be a little crazy or that I just love my blog that much; I'm gonna go with the latter. I have a million and one things that I want to share here and write about including my amazing trip to Savannah but sadly have not edited the photos and have not had a moment to really sit down and write a thought-out coherent sentence. That said posts will be coming along slowly this week but you can expect the blog to back up and running in full gear by next week, I swear it.

With all that said to bring summer to a close since this is my last week of summer vacation and next week is the beginning of fall semester and my LAST semester of college I thought I would share with you all some outfits that I wore this summer but never shared. Here I was testing out a new style of documenting my outfits. Rather than going out and doing mini photo shoots in them I wanted to just capture them immediately after being created in a candid snap-shop style. No makeup, no styling the situation or location, just me, my room and my clothes.

As you can see I often wear my hair in the same style of a top bun that if some cold-hearted person really desired could just come up and chop it off with a pair of scissors in one quick snip. I should really keep that in mind.... Anyways, what do you guys think of this style of shooting? Would you prefer to see more of this? Please comment and let me know. I am always thinking of how I want this blog to evolve and although I do love going out and doing mini photo shoots with my outfits I also wonder if I am creating too much of a stylized reality and not giving you all a fair and real perspective of me and my life. More on that soon enough. I hope you all enjoy your last few days of summer vacation as I know mine will be spent working like a dog, not that that's anything new.

I started my summer by spending a week at home in Savannah and I ended my summer by spending a little less than a week at home in Savannah. Although both trips may have been to the same place the experience on both of them were on two extremes of the spectrum. If you look back through my archive to the beginning of May you will find that I was in a much more depressing state of mind and you can see that through most of the photos. This time around I was in the complete opposite state of mind with an open heart and even more open eyes.

The plan was to spend a day roaming around Savannah with my boyfriend and then go camping for two days but as always things didn't quite work out that way and we ended up spending two days roaming around Savannah and camping for one day on Anastasia Island. No complaints as I had a wonderful time and got to spend a little more time with my family, force my baby sisters to dance in smoke bombs, watch the sunset on Tybee Island, set off more smoke bombs in my backyard while watching the sunrise, creep on a mother deer and her doe with my telephoto lens and take a TON of polaroids that will be in my other massive photo post tomorrow. For now click the 'Read More' link below to see a collection of mine and my boyfriends digital round-up of our summer vacation. (Note: I tried to keep the photos in chronological order as much as possible just so you know.)

On a side note I woke up this morning to find this photo of the forest in Savannah accepted by Photo Vogue; my first landscape accepted by them. To say the least I am very very happy. Don't forget to check in tomorrow to see my trip through Polaroids!

As I said yesterday I took a ton of polaroids on my vacation to Savannah and I wanted to share them in a separate post because I felt like the experience of my trip through them has a completely different feel. The way that I shoot digitally and with film is very different. For one with digital I know that I can take a plethora of shots of random things and not be worried about not having enough space on my memory card where as with film as I read somewhere once, "Film makes you learn to value every shot you take." I completely agree with this statement. With these polaroids for example which were taken with a Polaroid Land Camera and with expired film, thus the color distortion, I was limited to ten pictures per cartridge and only had 6 cartridges. This made me very picky about what I wanted to take pictures of and as a result I think you can see the difference in the way that I shot digitally and with film through not only the aesthetic of the mediums but also with the way I framed things and chose my subjects. Maybe this is just me reaching for something deeper that isn't even there, any thoughts? Either way please enjoy this final Savannah photo madness by clicking Read More.

For the past two semesters I have had the pleasure to be an intern for the college street style website CollegeFashionista. For the first semester I was assigned to write about what to wear to certain events and for the second semester I focused on accessories. During the internship I was also given some amazing opportunities that I will talk more about soon enough but for now have to keep under wraps. I just wanted to dedicate this post to all the Fashionista's and Fashionisto's, as we liked to call them over at CF, that let me photograph them and also to Amy and Melissa Levin. Thank you both so much for all of the incredible opportunities and everything that you have taught me. You can read all of my articles on these stylish students here.

I was also the main image for July 2013 on CollegeFashionista's free app. I was so ecstatic when I saw this last month and I don't know why I never shared the news here, I guess I was just waiting for the right moment.

I'm sure there are going to be a million back to school posts today on blogs, websites, facebook, instagram, twitter so on and so forth and by noon you are going to be screaming IDGAF!!!! What can I say though, I am going back to school for the last time (unless grad school really does find it's way into my future) and damn it I want to talk about what I'm wearing; these things are important to me.

Lately I've been inspired by the likes of menswear as this tends to happen once every few months and I have been wanting to incorporate more men's button down shirts, suspenders and ties into my attire; Monday, especially a back-to-school Monday seems like the perfect day to do so. It's the beginning of a new week, a new semester, a new set of classes and I want to look spiffy. I'm not too sure if the final results are so much spiffy as they are spiffy inspired but everything is relative I suppose. I have a lot to say on the subject of menswear as you will see or rather read later this week but for now I'll cut it short and leave you with my thoughts translated visually.
Happy back-to-school Monday everyone!

Lately I've been thinking a lot about androgyny; the extreme yet ambiguous subjects it entails, it's place in the fashion world, and how our society reacts to it. Within this post are some very interesting takes on the subject from a sociological and fashion point of view derived from Adorned in Dreams by Elizabeth Wilson. The photos are from a photo shoot I did recently with my favorite model/muse Janely Rodriguez and coincidentally fit well with the theme, in my opinion at least. The makeup is by the fucking incredible Kayla Carcone whom I recently did another project with that I will be posting behind the scenes shot's from soon enough.
In the meantime let us discuss the chaos that is androgyny.

“Today androgyny has ceased to be sacred. Modern fashion plays endlessly with the distinction between masculinity and femininity. With it we express our shifting ideas about what masculinity and femininity are. Fashion permits us to flirt with transvestism, precisely to divest it of all its danger and power.”

“Peter Ackroyd, writing about transvestism, takes an entirely different view, and suggests that what lies behind the social construction of gender is not a fear of passivity, but the fear of and desire for the ‘chaos of androgyny’, which he says is sacred:

'Cross dressing has often been the sign of an extraordinary destiny. In many shamanistic cultures, transvestites are regarded as sorcerers or visionaries, who, because of their double nature as men dressed as women, are sources of diving authority within the community….It is not surprising that this double nature should be seen as a sign of the sacred, when we consider the androgynous or at least bisexual nature of the deities [that] are worshiped….Androgyny, in which the two sexes co-exist in one form and which the transvestite priest imitates in his own person, is an original state of power.'"

“In these ‘liberated’ times a man in a skirt causes considerable anxiety and hostility. The counter-culture of the late sixties flirted with the idea…but in general in order to wear a skirt a man has to define himself as a transvestite, that is, a sexual deviant.”

“…outrage dressing, ambiguous as it is, may on occasion express simply—ambiguity. At first glance the androgyny of rock stars such as David Bowie shocks. New boundaries of boldness have surely been set when a man wears make-up, or a woman shaves her head…gender and desire are ultimately unstable. The rigid sexual identities we cultivate, and which are popularly experienced as ‘natural’ and given at birth, are really functions elaborated by the nineteenth-century sexologists; they merely imprison the waywardness of lust, constraining us in sexual and social roles.”

“Suzy Menkes (The Times, 1 May 1984) wrote about the 1984 fashions for ‘androgynous undies’ and masculinity in women’s dress, suggesting that these were ‘the ultimate fashion statement about the sexual revolution’. Suzy Menkes goes on to reveal, however, that this form of ‘cross dressing’, which is opening up the way to ‘gender-bending’ unisex departments in exclusive fashion stores, is simply a new fad and that—significantly—the market it is aimed at is the market of affluent heterosexual couples for whom androgynous dress symbolizes not an attack on gender but merely a reaffirmation of middle-class togetherness.”

What are your thoughts on 'the chaos of androgyny'?

After yesterday's thought provoking post on androgyny I thought I would try to be a little more light-hearted today on the subject, key word try. I've had these street style photos shot by Tommy Ton from the menswear collections in my archive for awhile now and as school is officially back in session menswear-esque items are a route I want to explore more in my style as you saw on Monday. In these photos I found it extremely interesting to see how the men and women both explored typical feminine and masculine traits in their suits and ties. The color schemes, cuts of the suits and accessories in these images are like sartorial porn for me. So much inspiration, so many ideas, so many things that I suddenly feel like I need in my life like a purple and pink polka dot tie, a straw boater hat and over-sized men's trousers. How am I surviving???? Ok, that's enough materialistic wallowing for me.

What I really wanted to discuss was how interesting it is to see that at the menswear collections practically everyone, men and women were seen clad in 3 piece suits, ties, loafers other types of men's inspired something. Yet at the women's wear collections you don't see a plethora of men running around in skirts and dresses. In the chaos of androgyny I was especially interested in the statement that was made about how in our society (Western culture more so than Eastern) we experience a sting of anxiety and hostility when we see a man in a skirt. Not that everyone feels this way, I certainly don't but for the most part a guy could not be seen walking around in a pleated leather Givenchy skirt without being ridiculed unless he was in New York. It's sad that these sartorial barriers have been broken for women and we just completely left the men behind. True androgyny will not exist until men can be accepted in women's wear just as easily as women can be accepted in men's wear.

Ladies and gentleman, it's that time of year again. A time when freshman are seen scurrying around in a frantic daze, seniors are also seen scurrying around in a determined and overwhelmed daze and everyone else is pretty much just riding the wave. Most importantly though, to me at least, is that in these first few weeks of school everyone from first years to grad students are seen spending a reasonable amount of time on their sartorial presentation making some great eye candy for the rest of us and of course for FIU Style Sightings.

A few week's ago in my last installment of FIU Style Sightings for the summer I got a very interesting comment from a reader who mentioned that I tend to lean towards photographing students that wear more artistic and funky outfits rather than a variety of styles like preppy, skater, hip hop influence, rich kids who look poor and poor kids who look rich. At first I was taken back by this comment but as I went through my photos I realized that they were completely right and from a psychological point of view it made sense that I would photograph people that dress the way that I dress. However from a sociological point of view it is extremely unfair of me to only photograph people who dress the way that I dress and act like those are on the only style sightings happening at FIU. So with all of that said I will try my very best this year to feature a wider variety of stylish students outside of the artistic funky ones and if you see me falling into my old rut then please call me out!

Michelen Hearn "I wanted to be comfortable but still feel cute. I wanted to feel nature-like."

Gian Carlo "Easy to wear and easy on the eyes."

Zi Zhang "It was the first thing I saw."

Akeem Todman "I just felt like throwing on some black."

Shani Campbell "I was going to look for a job so I wanted to look sophisticated."

Aymun Ahmed "It's really hot and this is a light material and looked nice."

Wajiha Rais "I have absolutely no idea."

Ceressa Feeman "I wanted something just chill and neutral; fresh first day."

Sierra Manno "I start with one piece and work up from there."

Thais Torquez "I wanted to stand out and this is what I feel comfortable in."

"The camera does not lie" yet photography soon became all about the technique of "lying" with the camera. I am constantly lying about the perception of me and my life by posing in certain ways, editing my photos, overlaying them with other images and selecting certain things to photograph while not selecting other things to photograph for a visually appealing aesthetic. A photograph is a fabrication that tells a limited bit about a limited thing.

Photography has allowed for more illusion than reality and the fashion industry thrives off of that. The fashion artist wishes to produce an attractive image in a style recognized as conveying modishness in general—he does not create an accurate record of a garment or a social comment, most of the time that is. Certainly you can look at the original McQueen or Maison Martin Margiela's work and see the extreme social commentary occurring but that is not my point in this particular rant.

I have been thinking, as always, where this blog has come and where I want it to go. I have also been thinking about the fashion blogging industry and I feel like sometimes the photos I see on personal style blogs seem too sterile and unrealistic; predetermined and trying to convey something that doesn't really exist. I miss the genuine authenticity like you saw when Susie Bubble was taking snapshots with the flash blurring her face.

With a new semester I want to reconsider the way that I am choosing to project myself here. Although I greatly enjoy going out and doing mini photo shoots of my outfits it isn't really a realistic perspective of my life. I know it's probably shocking to you all that I don't go and hang out on rooftops or nymph around in nature 24/7 but in fairness to you and myself if I talk about how I want this space to be about the experiences in my life and how that gets interpreted into my art then I should be showing you my life un-stylized, right? The authentic experience. Well that consists of me in my bed on a computer most of the time taking in visual inspiration and words as you can see above.

Obviously seeing photos of me in, on or around my bed might get dull after a while so I most likely will continue to still do stylized shoots here and there because doing photos like that are an escape for me into a world that doesn't really exist anywhere but in those photos. Taking those sorts of stylized shots are my chance to exist, even if just for 1/150 of a second, in a world that is not really my world but what I wish and get to imagine was from time to time. It is a stylized reality that is a reflection of the things going on in my soul and mind.

I want Elegant Idiosyncrasy to be a reflection of a real life, not a superficial accounting of a life. So with all of that said you can still expect to find my stylized photography but I will try to be sharing more realistic images, or as realistic as a person can be when they are photographing themselves.

I know that all of my photo's are self portraits but I wanted to do something a little different this time. A few week's back I got together with Janely to do some random shots that I've been wanting to experiment with and one of them was this Tim Walker inspired portrait. Obviously in no way am I comparing my photos to the likes of the great Tim Walker but his white studio, white table portraits of artists have always inspired me greatly. This all started with me asking Janely to bring some of her favorite and most emotionally loaded things to the shoot. She showed up with a book of fairy-tales from her childhood, a palm rose her father gave her, a necklace and a locket with her parents pictures in it. The results were quite stunning in my opinion.

After this ridiculously beautiful turnout I spent a good amount of time thinking about doing something like this of myself. Although I am taking self portraits all the time I didn't want this to be a portrait about my outfit of the day or how I was feeling on this particular day or in this particular place. I wanted it to represent me: Ashley Garner, aged 21, artist, girl, woman? Human. For me the hardest part was trying to decide what I would want to have on the table. What is precious enough to me that I can place onto a table to represent me subjectively?

At first there were so many things that came to mind; a million photographs, jewelry pieces, clothing, books and random tidbits but as I thought about it a little harder I managed to always talk myself out of those things. Though they do mean a lot to me and do represent me to an extent there was still something lacking. What I ended up choosing were dried rose petals that I keep in my room on shelves and in sketchbooks and my coffee cup.

I have always been fond of dried flowers more than live ones because there is something tragically and romantically beautiful about them that pull my heart strings. There is an ephemeral mystery within them and the obvious signs of life and death that only make them more attractive. To me a dried rose is far more romantic and loaded with emotional meaning than a fresh one. As for the coffee cup, well, if you know anything about me than you know that I can not get through a day without coffee ever since I was 14 and had my first vanilla cappuccino in Berlin. Now 8 years later it's only strong black coffee for me. With all this said and probably much more than I should have I am very pleased with the results. It makes me want to photograph all of my friends like this so friends, seriously, contact me if you're interested.

After yesterday's attempt at a self-portrait that was as simple and to the point as possible I couldn't help myself when I saw all of that negative white space and be inspired to play around with a few of the outtakes. As much as I love the simplicity in yesterday's self portraits I am a very eclectic girl and white doesn't always sit well with me. By definition the word eclectic means "made up of what is selected from different sources" and I am not one to deny that I am made up of a wide variety of different sources as we all are. I thought it would be fun to re-imagine my self portrait shoot by incorporating shots from my recent trip to my birth-town Savannah, one of the many sources that influence who I am. The results are quite different from yesterday's and I like it that way.I am more fond of the one on the right rather than the left but they are both so different that I really can't decide. Either way this was a really fun and interesting way to create re-create my self-portrait as it always is when I use modern technology to further express my emotional state. These are the perks of a digital revolution.

There has been a plethora of people to take pictures of the first two weeks of school thus far. I feel like there are already an overload of pictures in this post and the last and yet have still left so many out. I don't know if this is just the result of me opening up my eyes finally or it is simply our psychological need to impress people at the beginning of the semester and then slowly decline in our lack of care as the months move on; only time will tell.

For the past few weeks I have begun asking students what made them get dressed in their outfit that day. The responses have been quite interesting really. Sometimes it is purely a desire for comfort, sometimes it's the only thing that was clean and other's are responses that I would have never expected. I think I will continue doing this as I find it to be an extremely effective way to understand the individual a little more and their relationship with the way their outfits in a more personal yet still distant manner. Also on a side note I was recently interviewed by Chasseur Magazine about my blog and other art outlets. Check it out here.

Katelyn Ocampo "It was the first thing I saw."

Alexia Stark "I was feeling really bloated today."

Reginald Justilien, "I wasn't feeling too bright and wanted to have something around my waist."

Ruth Thompson "I didn't know what to wear."

Aurelia Luchkan "I was thinking of my favorite character Elizabeth in Bioshock."

Kris-Ann Grant "This is my style; very hip hop funk."

Dustin Depina "I'm cool as fuck and this is just how I dress."
"Why do you think you're cool as fuck?"
"'Cus I have a state of mind and a mentality that not many people have."

Sierra Manno "I usually just start with one piece and work from there."

Najee Turnbull "It was random really, I just like blue."

Drew Jones "I woke up and just instantly knew I wanted to wear this. I think I dreamed this last night."
"What did you dream about?"
"My mom weirdly enough."

There is something about white walls that completely terrifies me. Unlike some people who find them to be a refreshing clean slate when I see a blank wall I feel like I am suffocating. Like all of the juices have been sucked out of me and I am being weighed down by the blank-ness.

There is this theory in the fine art world about the gallery aka the white cube. The reason that art galleries are for the most part painted white is so that when you come into the space you can judge the art without the outside world influencing your point of view on the piece. I can completely understand this yet for some reason I am still slightly bothered by the idea of having to paint the walls white in order to appreciate the art. To me I see this act as creating a vacuum to rid the viewer of culture, experience and the outside influence that created the person that created this art piece. To rid the viewer of life essentially.

White suffocates me and I feel like I'm drowning when I walk into a room that has nothing on it's walls. My walls are for the most part covered with images, nic-nacs, jewelry and clothing. I turn my four corners into an oasis of constantly flowing inspiration from a wide variety of sources. When I walk into a white room I feel like all of that inspiration is stuck inside of my head and I have a pressing desire to scream and break out of this vacuum by covering the walls in lengthy turbulent words, bleeding emotions and colorful creativity.

There's something about white walls that just doesn't sit well with me and perhaps it is simply the rebel inside. I understand that I create work that simply reads better on a white wall rather than a black one and that is something that has taken me a very long time to accept. White is not always a vacuum but a space to breath and that's how many people read it. My blog will be going through a major re-design soon so these thoughts on my bitter-ness against white and naive attachment to black are in the process of being hashed out and overcome. Recognition is the first step to recovery or so they say. I hope they are right because I need to get over myself and learn to embrace all the greatness that white has to offer.

The dress that I am wearing in these photos is from Guess and it was a very difficult decision for me to make to purchase it. Not that I don't enjoy it greatly and find it's sweetheart Little Bo-Peep vibe appealing but that it seems too sweet or too clean to me, much like my feelings towards the white wall. In the end I obviously bought it and love the way it fits and looks against my skin tone but for some reason or another it doesn't feel 110% me. Maybe wearing it to a picnic in a jokingly stereotypical picnic outfit way but otherwise I would pair it with boots, my Comme des Fuckdown beanie and a sweater or shawl of some ragged sort. However 'me' is a constantly evolving thing so perhaps this dress was my subconscious self trying to unveil another aspect of my personality that I have been avoiding for less than obvious reasons. On an unrelated note the photos above and below were recently accepted by Photo Vogue; couldn't be happier :)

As important as my personal style is to me my interior style holds an equal amount of importance. I always say that our environment and audience influence the way that we dress ourselves and that is especially true when it comes to my bedroom. I can not create to my fullest creative extent if I am in a white walled room as I expressed clearly yesterday in White Walls. I need to cover the small space that surrounds my bed with magazine pages, sketchbook scribbles, jewelry, clothing that is a work of art, found items, dried flowers, glass bottles and make believe galaxies. My room is a museum of my heart, a sanctuary for my creativity and vulnerability. It is my soul pouring out wildly, un-apologetically and ferociously. I've gone through several attempts to organize my room in a more coherent manner but I've come to accept that that doesn't work for me. I am a little chaotic, all over the place, messy, erratic and bursting at the seams so it would seem appropriate for my room to be the same. I think we all know that our bedroom or interior space of any sort is important to creating a reflective state of mind so I have for you all today some photos my interior space, maybe it will give you some insight into my state of mind.

Recently there has been a bit of uproar at my school in the art department and the reasons behind this are lengthy and political but it got me thinking about the institutions that determine what will and will not be shown to the public. This results in what will and will not be recognized as art or as worthy and move forward in the realm of popularity but what is really happening is not the determination of good art but rather art that has value, not style.

In the art world it is the galleries and museums that run the game. Their empirical stamp of approval turns artists from starving into mega super stars, especially if one person likes your work enough to give you a solo show and know's the right people to have come to your show. In the fashion world the same thing goes for the magazines. They run designers, models, photographers and stylists careers. If you are featured in an editorial in Vogue under any of these titles you are suddenly the shit even though Vogue America is a shitty magazine (if you are a true fashion enthusiast I pray you agree). Now of course that is not to say that just because you are in a gallery or featured in a magazine then you are a sell out or not a good artist but rather that just because something is in these institutions doesn't make it good art.

It's mind boggling that we are still desperate for the approval of the institution even though many of us would agree that the institution is what ruins art in the fashion or fine art sense. We create real, authentic, heart throbbing work and then if it's not accepted by the magazine industry or within the gallery walls then it is suddenly not deemed good enough because it is not sale-able or commercial enough. It's too raw, too different; it doesn't fit within the institutions guidelines or parameters. We as the artists have the power to stop putting out bullshit sterile meaningless work by refusing to accept that that is what we have to do to be accepted. I refuse to accept that just because something is in Vogue or the MOMA then it is good. Be the change you wish to see in the world.

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