“Women’s History Museum MORT de la MODE….Everything must go!” Exhibition

Company (88 Eldridge St)

This event has ended.

Large signage announcing: “STORE CLOSING”, “EVERYTHING MUST GO”, “RETAIL SPACE FOR RENT” is now a common sighting. Perhaps the drying up of retail stores exposes the mirage of fantasies they always were — the illusions of grandeur they once portrayed evaporating in their financial ruin. Our abandoned shop stands as a relic of these shared spaces — a tomb of capitalist ills. It is a rumination on the longing for opulence, mitigated by the grim dead ends of our material reality and the undeniable waste of our society. We indulge in manic aesthetics of materialism run amok, all the while striving for a space of fantasy.

Fashion itself too is more of a stand in for the longing to transcend the limits of the body. However, in the endless thirst for La Mode, we are always chained to its dependent relationship to the human form and its susceptibility to time, wear, and decay. A transition to virtual commerce is a natural new habitat for shopping mania, with its promise of infinite possibilities and its freedom from corporeality. The perils of online shopping are explored in our video game, Boutique Virtuelle: Massive Disposal, which also examines some of our own questionable obsessions with materialism. The setting of the game is a metaphorical mall meant to embody the main character’s compulsive online shopping habits. Stuck in this dead space, the character must collect items to possibly escape or else remain in a purgatory of lonely delirium.

The mode is mort, and still we shop.

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Women’s History Museum was founded by Mattie Barringer (b. 1990) and Amanda McGowan (b. 1990) in 2015 out of the desire to create novel and previously unseen images of beauty. The duo engages with fashion as a medium that has the potential to exist beyond regurgitative spectacle and the ability to change the fabric of reality. Their art practice, which includes sculpture, film, painting, drawing, photography and performance, is dictated by meticulously sourced historical materials and close collaborations with other artists who often double as models in their fashion shows. In an effort to encompass the psychic reality of fashion and foster a creative community, they interrogate the idea of the museum and insist on alternative and inclusive methods of recording history.

This is Women’s History Museum’s first solo exhibition with Company Gallery. Other recent solo shows include those at LUMA Westbau, Zurich; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, and Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore. Their latest fashion show, “SEZX”, occurred at Company Gallery in February 2020.