Exhibition 1: Introducing the Dressed Self

Exhibition 1: Introducing the Dressed Self

Curator: Cyana Madsen

Date: 1st July 2024 – 24th July 2024

“[…]we may take the term ‘personal front’ to refer to the other items of expressive equipment, the items that we most intimately identify with the performer himself and that we naturally expect will follow the performer wherever he goes. As part of personal front we may include: insignia of office or rank; clothing[…]”

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956, p. 14)

In his mid-20th century study of human social life, Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman proposed that we individuals live our lives in a state of constant performance. To participate in social life we continually perform our version of reality for our audience, the society of observers which surround us, and we perform this reality for ourselves.

An essential aspect of this performance is how we construct and conduct ourselves through our personal appearance, an appearance which includes our clothing. The garments we choose to wear in public, those we don in private at home, and even those that we would never dare to wear in front of even our closest loved ones are all part of this performance of the self.

If our clothing informs how we are positioned in the social world and thus how we experience the world around us, it also collects the marks and signs of this experience in its material: the soles of our shoes become worn as we walk through town; our trousers crease around the knees as we move; from our actions in everyday life we get stains, marks, and holes in our clothing.

Using items of worn clothing from the collection of curator Cyana Madsen, this installation considers how the clothing of the “Public, Private and Secret” (Eicher, 2020) selves come together to create our social identity, and in the process, collect the memories of our worn experience in the material.

Beginning with this exhibition of worn clothing, the vitrine window of Madsen Sylvester Studio will be an experimental site for curators, artists, and researchers to explore all aspects of clothing, the self, and our world through a rotating series of installations and interventions.

Images Courtesy of Madsen Sylvester Studio.