Cat Chow. photo Robert Crawford via Kresge Art Museum
Just a couple more days to check this out. Conceptual fashion Portland only under the most special hothouse circumstances…this time it’s imported from New York on display at RAW (Reed Arts Week) at Reed College through the weekend. Cat Chow has one foot in the world of visual art with shows at museums and blue chip galleries and one foot in fashion (she did GenArt Styles in 2000 where she won the Avant-Garde Design Vision Award). She creates experimental materials from everyday objects (often hard goods, zipper, measuring tape) that she then crafts into garments, making hard soft. Chow’s zipper dress Bonded, a white gown made entirely of a single length of zipper, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection.
Chow is showing “some special pieces focusing on this year’s ‘ghosts’ theme” of RAW, fittingly, as her 2007 installation at NY’s Elk Gallery “As I Lay Dying” featured a crocheted coffin, completed, so the story goes, in Chow’s apartment as the body of a neighbor lay decaying in the apartment upstairs for four days before anyone discovered it.
See work by Cat Chow at Vollum Lounge on the Reed College Campus through Sunday from 12-6 PM daily.
Chow is doing a workshop where students will alter a piece of clothing they bring on Friday at 2 PM (Winch/Capehart) but the workshop is limited to 15 students so you’d need to RSVP to raw@reed.edu