With the opening of a temporary pop-up store in Graz, Sissa Micheli (born 1975 in Bruneck, Austria) approximates the junctions between art and fashion. In a sense, the artist draws an interdisciplinary seam around the fashion of young designers and the works of fellow artists.

In the context of the social, the constellation of different people and identities establishes an ensemble—and hence a form of commonality against a horizon of difference. In the context of art, the term assemblage stands for the act of associating various objects with a common configuration—and hence a form of relations with a view to heterogeneity. Let’s say, an ensemble of objects which, on account of the differences connecting them, results in a cluster of relations: a figure of heterogeneity. Sissa Micheli links her assemblages to the term “objective correlative”, which alludes to T. S. Eliot and literary combinations of actions, objects, and images. It thus refers to the narrative trails that evolve from the ensembles: be it a tripod, a shoe, a helicopter. This is an ensemble fostered by standing, carrying, walking, and flying—just a trace of a parable for a condensed life, a fabric that abstracts figuration, reified to poetry, to a form of sculptural literature, to a belles lettres of material. Invited to participate in the ensemble of art and fashion of the S/GHT POP UP project shown at the Künstlerhaus in Graz, Sissa Micheli suggested carrying the concept further: to find a form that facilitates a re-association of relations among heterogeneous objects and materials, between genres and disciplines, between art and fashion. In the context of her work, the artist will be designing a display that will integrate the various S/GHT fashion labels so as to configure an ensemble of clothing, art, and imagery in the exhibition space. The main motif here is focused on picture frames that, in contrast to their usual use, are affixed to the wall at an angle of 90 degrees and thus project out into the room. In this way, they offer the necessary structure for hanging up clothes: objects that are divested of, or disrobed from, their function in order to assume a new function. Or, to use textile language: a gesture of untying and knotting at the same time. And yet the picture frames remain open to interpretation as pictures frames, as frames for the image of vacancy, an imaginary image that, with its spatial disposition, can embrace the room, that becomes inscribed as spatial texture, as an ensemble of relations and correlations, of “objective correlatives”. The picture frames serve as supporting figures both for the hanging fixtures and for the dressing room and a table—for a question of framing that is self-exposed. Was remains of the frame is an insinuation, a configuration, one that promises a picture. Against this backdrop, the items of clothing themselves appear to be a frame, waiting to welcome whomever into the picture, handing the frame over to an imaginary identity. Like the frames, the clothing pieces are waiting for their pictorial carrier, for the moment, the gesture, through which the visage of the imaginary self appears. The titles of the “objective correlatives” by Sissa Micheli insist upon desire, on conforming to an idea, on being an image: “I want to be a dreamhouse, I want to be a helicopter, I want to be a patriot . . .”—like a name, a personal name, a label that belongs to no one and yet promises the glimpse of an identity: “I want to be Nanushka, I want to be MESHIT, I want to be Base Range . . . Sissa & S/GHT”.

(Text by Andreas Spiegl)