Designers of Mezzo: An Experimental Fashion Event
Alexandra Rae Ciardullo: The Land of the Unknown
Artist Bio
Alexandra Ciardullo is a fiber artist completing her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Originally from Brooklyn, New York she now lives in Baltimore, MD.
Alexandra is inspired by the familiar and the unfamiliar. Using references to nature, early American Horror and her childhood, she enjoys the otherworldly and surrealistic sense of the world around her.
Artist Statement
Between using puppetry, costume, soft sculpture, installation and drawing, my work references a tale that could be told by many different voices. Who are they? Where are they from? What is their story? These are the questions I want my viewers to ask. The Land of the Unknown is a series of puppetry and performing objects that evoke characters that come from an unknown place. They are wise, they are curious, scared, silly and brave. All characteristics that the puppet can create. The puppet has an ability to create a transformative and exaggerated experience in relationship to both the body and the performer.
Amanda Elie: Moitié Kreole
Artist Bio
Amanda is a fiber artist and designer born in New York,and is currently a senior Fiber major with a concentration in Experimental Fashion, graduating in May 2018. Growing up, Amanda found her passion in clothing and textiles. Amanda pursued this passion at the Maryland Institute College of Art to study fiber and experimental fashion. Amanda’s focus and passions developed as she began to dive into psychology and the study of personal identity development and how those connections relate to garment making.
Artist Statement
Moitié Kreole is a collection of ten looks that showcases an exploration through the designer’s cultural identity as a half-Haitian and half-Puerto Rican woman. Moitié Kreole is a response to growing up in America and noticing the almost absent presence of Haitian designers, artists, and culture in social media. After traveling to Haiti, she was exposed to not only the art and culture, but its history involving the sexual repression of the female shape in women’s fashion. The imagery shown in Moitié Kreole was inspired by the use of color and lines in Haitian art.
This collection uses powerful silhouettes, bold colors, and graphic linework to exude self confidence and pride.
Breanna Marinaccio: Death Of Venus
Artist Bio
Breanna Marinaccio is a designer and artist from New York. She transferred to the Maryland Institute College of Art her junior year with an associate’s degree in Visual Arts. Currently, she is in her senior year at MICA, majoring in Fiber with concentration in Experimental Fashion. She will be graduating May 2018. She has an ongoing passion for fashion and garment design. Her artwork includes weaving and rope work that she has integrated into her designs.
Artist Statement
The Death of Venus is a saying good-bye to the goddess of love, desire and sexuality, laying to rest the ideal vision of the female figure so that a new one may be reborn. This line encourages female empowerment, and it is inspired by artist and designers such as Alexander McQueen and Iris Van Herpen. The garments incorporate hand-made rope and weaving, which is reminiscent of the image of women tied and bonded to society’s roles imposed upon them. “I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress” -Alexander McQueen.
Charlie Rincon-Rodriguez: Avila
Artist Bio
Charlie Rincon-Rodriguez (Born Carlos Enrique Rincon-Rodriguez) is a multidisciplinary visual artist and fashion designer born in Caracas, Venezuela. After completing his high school education, he attended the Maryland Institute College of Art where he began experimenting with materials and eventually selecting neon as his medium of choice while also being highly interested in fashion. Charlie has exhibited in both solo and group shows, completed an internship at Opera Gallery Miami, shown at DC Fashion Week, has been a featured photographer on Vogue Italy as well as debuting his first collection Avila during the spring.
Artist Statement
Named after the mountain in the capital of Venezuela, Avila is a minimalist and modern collection inspired by the culture of the designer’s hometown, Caracas. This collection draws inspiration from natural and national symbols, Venezuelan artists such as Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesus Rafael Soto, post Perez-Jimenez architecture, and the Latina women who he grew up around, Avila celebrates the beauty and sophistication of South American women who are chic, bold, elegant.
Claire Cho: ALINE
Artist Bio
Claire Cho is a graduating BFA Fiber major at MICA. Ever since she was a child, she loved storytelling as a way to create imaginative worlds and whimsical wonders. Her work is focused in smart textiles and materials in order to problem solve concerns that exist around the world or to simply create to praise. ALINE is special to her in that she goes back to her roots in the fine art to bring together all her studies and make for the sake of enjoying the art of making.
Artist Statement
ALINE is a collection of the arts exploring what a line is through material and the art of making. By creating my own textiles, fibers and material this collection starts from the basics to ”. Through whimsicality and the hybridization of Fine arts and Fashion ALINE comes to life. “What is a line?” is the main question explored and many of the answers exist in anything and everything, with repetition through motion in pleats and folds.
The LINE of now is to navigate in space, to see where LINE goes and to see where it ends.
The fine LINE between art and fashion.
The LINE that repeats in a rhythmic obsession.
ALINE- what does it mean? What is a LINE made of and what does it keep?
A LINE is a boundary, or a goal; it transforms into an endless world of possibilities within its own identity.
Clarissa Iskandar: Moremo
Artist Bio
Clarissa Iskandar is a Maryland-based artist whose practice involves material construction, surface design, and garment construction. Studying fiber art at the Maryland Institute College of Art, she becomes interested in the relationship between planes and three-dimensional objects. She uses easily found materials to elevate their purpose and transform their function in order to create feminine and playful wear. Her work explores sculptural surfaces and collage that exists within wearable art and fashion.
Artist Statement
Moremo is inspired by loungewear with 1980s color scheme. This collection is a combination of ready-to-wear and costume. By using materials such as pee-pads and acrylic yarn, the collection defines fashion in which cheap, easily found materials could be made beautiful. The gridded rectangle, triangle and circle motifs are based on the idea of three basic shapes that create all things which are painted to resemble stained-glass or mosaic-like quality. Moremo is a collection about painting characters through colors and yarn work, which relates to the childhood experience of drawing dolls to life.
Courtney Banh: Basin
Artist Bio
Courtney Banh is a fiber artist, garment designer and ceramicist from Austin, Texas. She is a senior fiber major with a concentration in experimental fashion, and her practice spans garment and sculpture. Her personal connections to coiling come from the circular and cyclical nature of the process. Her work exists between the realms of fashion and art, where each discipline informs the other in her creative practice.
Artist Statement
Body enters and exits vessel. The vessel remains. To return garments to their most basic form is to simply see the vessel and the natural, ergonomic urge to fill it. Recognizing the impermanence of garments, Basin seeks to eternalize fashion and a consumerist relationship to objects. Giving garments the satisfaction of physicality, functionality and variability, this body of work challenges a wasteful and mundane relationship to clothing. Although embodying the ideas, even caricatures, of garments, the rope objects are scaled to the body, though not necessarily to its delegated part of the body. As bodies move fluidly through the rope objects, the acts of dressing and undressing create a point of interaction that involves the space beyond just the wearer and garment.
Emily Wolfe: Nymphalidae
Artist Bio
Emily Wolfe is an artist working towards her BFA in Fiber at MICA, and is originally from San Diego, California. She considers herself a fashion and costume designer. She is interested in theater, lingerie, and costume. She is also interested in performing objects, such as puppetry and sculpture. Emily feels deeply connected to themes of fantasy, science fiction, history, and entomology, which influence the majority of her work. She is most inspired when working creatively on the body, especially when she is creating a character for a person to portray. Emily aspires to bring a sense of whimsy, fantasy, and general imagination to her audience.
Artist Statement
My collection is an exploration of the enhancement of the body through juxtaposing sex appeal and an ethereal aesthetic. The garments encourage body confidence in the wearer and their partner. In entertaining this concept, the garments both hug the wearer tightly and drape softly down their form. The looks in my collection mirror the color palette and physicality of a butterfly, which is a creature renowned for its beauty and ethereal nature.
Grayson Gross: Get Home Safe
Artist Bio
Grayson is a junior fiber major at the Maryland Institute and College of Art. They enjoy cycling, pancakes, burlesque, and science fiction.
Artist Statement
Grayson’s line, Get Home Safe, is about people coming together to make the group feel safe. They are interested in exploring sexuality and gender (femininity in particular) through the lens of retro-futuristic costumes. Grayson draws a lot of their inspiration from 1950’s sci-fi, pulp novels, and comics about women.
Margaret Garrison: MAETIAY
Artist Bio
Margaret Garrison is a Senior Fiber major from Seattle, Washington. She is interested in exploring different methods of incorporating digital fabrication techniques with traditional garment techniques. Margaret is passionate about hand-dyeing, digital textile printing, material experimentation, and product development.
Artist Statement
These garments are a celebration of form, texture, movement, and change that can be achieved through material experimentation. By incorporating digital fabrication, hardware, and machining techniques, clothing can stray away from traditional fiber techniques and drapery. These familiar geometric shapes are used to question what we know about mechanical parts and connections. Using familiar silhouettes seen in fast fashion she then incorporates fine art and sculpture to distance her work from corporate design.
Contrasting with traditional runway fashion, the second part of this collection become streetwear uniforms of labor and hardware. The function of jumpsuits and outerwear mixed with colors alludes playful confidence. MAETIAY is a line designed for the wearer to enjoy function and transformation to fulfill the movement that machines and garments are made for by contrasting two sides of the apparel design world.
MAETIAY is a phonetic spelling of the French word “métier” meaning occupation, or trade in which one excels. With a passion for apparel design and creating, these garments stay true to the human form and laborious techniques of manufacturing, but with a twist.
Stevie Pniewski: Missionary SUPERSTAR
Artist Bio
Stevie Pniewski is a fiber artist, garment maker, and leatherworker currently based in Baltimore, Maryland. They will soon graduate from the Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA from the Fiber department, and a concentration in Experimental Fashion. Their work focuses on gender, identity, and performance within fashion. Stevie explores this by experimenting with gendered garments, workwear, leather, and hardware.
Artist Statement
Missionary SUPERSTAR aims to explore the area in which feminine and masculine garments meet. It juxtaposes the idea of masculine as “strong” and feminine as “soft”, using different styles of dress and silhouettes throughout history as the jumping off point. The collection deeply explores aprons, corsets, and men’s heavy duty workwear garments. Leather is used with a nod to fetish gear, women’s pockets & handbags, whereas workwear expresses ideas of gender fluidity. This is a performance of fashion, gender, and identity that uses camouflage techniques from ships, bright colors, and disorienting patterns to introduce new and exciting looks.
Marina Constantine: dredge
Artist Bio
Originally from Bel Air, Maryland, Marina Constantine is a Baltimore-based, Greek-American artist specializing in fiber artistry, sculpture and book arts with her main focus in weaving. Her Yiayia (grandmother) and Pappou (grandfather), upon arrival to the United States in 1967, opened a shoemaking and seamstress shop. As a child, Marina was constantly surrounded by craft and fiber work and learned to sew hand in hand with learning how to write. Currently, she attends the Maryland Institute College of Art where she studies Fiber and will graduate in May of 2018 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts
Artist Statement
i don’t know what to do. there are things in my head and frost on my lips. the red. no. the yellow green blue purple gray grows under my skin now. when i blink i see it boiling and the soup of it drips onto my fingers and sears them. inside it’s made of pine needles pool water sand box scrapings magenta nail polish plastic shoes. there are things in my bed and the freezer meat starts thawing. I don’t know what it is. waking up choking on the bubblegum. no. the overcooked spaghetti popped balloons aquarium gravel gauze pads. there are things under my bed and they sprout flowers and teeth the colors of sprinkles and mold