In the series Brain Fashion, Antwerp-based Belarusian photographer Alexey Shlyk (born in 1986) shows whimsical responses to the world of fashion. Originally conceived in collaboration with the sculptor Maksim Makarevich, Brain Fashion reflects on the visual impact of fashion industry with insight and wit.
Shlyk’s large-size analogue photographs play around the standard representations of luxury shoes by distorting them, discarding their colourful appearance to turn them into monumental sculptural objects while examining Chinese idioms. Here and there, shoelaces are composing Chinese characters, such as dao 道 that is punning on the word ‘walk’. Far from the mere panegyric of fashion industry, to its credit Shlyk has chosen an insightful path in problematizing his artworks’ capacities of showing diverse intuitive and whimsical responses to the world of fashion.
