This exhibition brought together sculptural and photographic works created by Alexey Shlyk and Maksim Makarevich, two Belarusian artists who belonged to the artist collective Concept Art Confession Group (CAC). Putting together twenty-two photographs, six sculptures and one installation together, the CAC Group reflected on the visual impact of fashion industry with insight and wit.
Curated in collaboration with Izabella Tarasova and Oleg Shobin, the CAC Group had always been keen to adopt a distinctive approach to creativity by notably emphasizing on classical techniques. On this occasion, Makarevich and Shlyk took a particular pride of using bronze and silver gelatin photographic process. Shlyk’s large-size analogue photographs played 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 punned on the word ‘walk’. Following the idea of pun and distorted meanings, some of Makarevich’s sculptures replaced the usual lively connotation of shoes by death and stillness. Far from the mere panegyric of fashion industry, to its credit Brain Fashion exhibition chose an insightful path in problematizing artworks’ capacities of showing diverse intuitive and whimsical responses to the world of fashion.
