The artist is Ann Hamilton. The artwork is titled “side by side.coats.” The location is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, better known as LACMA. The artwork itself is an installation piece comprised of over a dozen wool costs hung from rods side by side along a wall in one of LACMA’s BCAM galleries. But on close inspection these coats are not ordinary.
The coats are a conceptual conceit. Each coat is actually made of two halves of a different state of the garment. One half is the finished, patterned, cut, tailored, stitched product, recognizable as an item of outwear you might have in your wardrobe or in a shop, something worn around New York City on a cold day in February. The other half is the raw fleece, wool sourced from Portugal, in the matching shape of the coat but otherwise misshapen, lumpy, hairy, tousled, wild, like something worn by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film “The Revenant.”
The side-by-side framework is evident as a device thats draws the viewer into an exercise of comparisons. Confronted with this contrast in textiles, one can’t help but think about process, the before and after of a the wool and what it takes to render the raw material into the final fashion commodity.
GLOBAL GRAPHICA 