Mori is fascinated by the way contemporary Japanese society balances technology, fantasy, and humanity. With an affectionate perspective on her native country, she explores the way fantasy and reality overlap in contemporary Japanese consciousness. Hers is a world where cartoon characters step out of comic books to stalk the real streets and real people withdraw from their grim routine to lose themselves in cartoon fantasies.

Play With Me (1994)

Mariko stands outside a busy Tokyo video store, dressed in form-fitting plastic armor and a cascading turquoise Barbie wig. She looks like a cross between a samurai waif and a robotic streetwalker who may have materialized from the video game beside her.

Tea Ceremony III (1995)

In this piece Mariko is an interplanetary geisha, dispensing tea to businessmen. Her ”office lady” uniform is regulation black, but her tight-fitting silver cap has pointy Martian ears.

Empty Dream (1995)

Mori digitally inserts herself four times into a photograph of Ocean Dome – the largest indoor theme park in the world, including an artificial beach, waves and all. Posing among happy Japanese bathers, Mori is costumed as a coy mermaid.  Hybrid creature, hybrid world; made for each other.

Birth of A Star (1996)

‘Birth of a Star”,  named for a television talent show, she is the demonic punk incarnation of the look-alike, sound-alike ingenue singers who are Japan’s premier teeny-bop idols.

Miko no Inori / The Shaman-Girl’s Prayer (1996)

In the video, which plays simultaneously on five small screens, Mori looks coquettishly extraterrestrial. With silver hair and menthol-blue eyes, she rotates and massages a glass globe in her hands as if conjuring the future. Outfitted entirely in white, the artist takes on the role of ‘alien’ (much like the being depicted in Last Departure) erotically caressing a crystal ball in her hands. All the while, Mariko voice can be heard singing an evocative ballad in her native tongue.

 Watch an excerpt of the video

Last Departure (1996)

Mariko assumes the same persona but is shown full length and in triplicate, enshrined inside a fabulous spaceship (actually a digitally morphed image of Osaka’s hypermodern Kansai airport). There’s an iconic cast to this triad: the figures suggest Buddhist Barbarellas.  They hold a glass sphere in their hands, much like a crystal ball used by mystics for telling the future – perhaps they have come to show us our destiny. The crystal ball also alludes to the 1980 novel Nantonaku Kurisutoru (Somehow, Crystal), by Yasuo Tanaka that describes the lives of fashion obsessed young women much like the young ‘cyborgs’ who patrol the streets of the Yamanote district in Tokyo.

 3-D video Nirvana (1996-97)

The title refers to the blissful emptiness that is the goal of Buddhist spiritual practice — Ms. Mori appears as the popular deity Kichijoten, in a peach-colored kimono and floating over a Dead Sea landscape tinted an acidic orange-pink. She executes a sequence of ritual gestures, accompanied by a band of cartoon musicians who zoom out toward the viewer before the whole scene dissolves into galactic mist.

Pure Land, from the Esoteric Cosmos series (1996–1997)

In order to participate in the aptly named experience, Nirvana, the viewer is led in to a dark room and asked to don 3D glasses before the film begins. The artist appears as a dancing Shaman dressed in a traditional ornate kimono and floating on a lotus flower. The Shaman is surrounded by pastel coloured elves called tunes, which each play a different Japanese musical instrument. Mariko hums and sings Japanese pop songs through a fuzzy echo chamber and the audience is treated to burst of cool, scented air on their faces. A crystal ball, much like the one featured in previous works, floats out of the sky and into the Shaman’s delicate hands.  The backdrop to Nirvana is a breath-taking view of the Dead Sea at dawn – empty yet pure.

Kumano (1997-1998)

Ms. Mori’s blend of eclectic religious symbolism, cyber technology and pop culture is well informed on all three fronts. And when she turns her attention to Japanese spirituality, as she does in the recent two-part ”Kumano,” the results are even more complex and erudite.

The work entitled Kumano is both a photograph and a film. The title refers to a Pacific peninsula in the south of Japan’s main island, a region of breathtaking natural beauty saturated in religious myth. It is the site of an important Buddhist pilgrimage circuit; legendarily Buddhist saints departed in boats from its shores in search of the Pure Land paradise. Also here are some of the country’s highest waterfalls, many of them worshiped as Shinto gods. The sun goddess Amaterasu, from whom the imperial family descends, has her shrine at nearby Ise.

In the ”Kumano” photo-mural, a purifying waterfall streams down through a grove of cedar trees; a high-tech forest shrine hovers like an apparition, as does Ms. Mori herself in the guise of the sun goddess with her symbolic mirror.

In the video, the image of the goddess flitting like a ray of light among the trees alternates with a scene of Ms. Mori performing the tea ceremony, whose elaborate etiquette she learned as a child. She gives it an unconventional tweak here by including an ancient bronze Chinese vessel among the utensils she uses, yet another indication of the hybrid, pan-Asian nature of much of her recent work.

Dream Temple (1997)

 Pratibimba (1998)

Mariko is dressed as Past, Present and Future (the three members of the Pratibimba triptych) performing Shinto rituals and running through the woods of the Wakayama Prefecture. The whole experience is made all the more enigmatic and enchanting due to the pretty, lilting songs the artist sings as she summons her audience toward the digital representation of the Dream Temple in the background.

WAVE UFO (1999)

Primal Rhythms 2007

Primal Rhythms is sponsored by  the FAOU foundation, a  nonprofit that Mori established in 2010. This project  focuses on uniting technology with ancient forces to create a harmonious, primal work on an island far from civilization.

The foundation’s mission is to explore nature and promote ecology through art. Primal Rhythms, involves a Plexiglas column, and the intimate engagement of a secluded community on the Japanese island of Miyako, part of the okinawa Prefecture. The end product will consist of the three-meter-high sun Pillar and the Moon Stone, a floating LED-equipped sphere, three meters in diameter. The pillar will jut up from a rock cluster in the island’s seven Light Bay from which it will cast a shadow over the water toward the shore that at the winter solstice will intersect with the Moon stone, anchored in the bay and changing color according to the phase of the moon and the tide. Once this Asian project is completed, Mori plans to bring site-specific works tailored to local cultures to five additional continents, beginning with South America.

Before officially beginning her work on Primal Rhythms, in 2007, Mori visited a number of sacred sites around the world and was especially intrigued by dwellings from the Jomon period in Japan—roughly 14,000 B.C. to 300 B.C.—which were associated with sculptural forms that later influenced her designs. “Two objects were always found in a particular area,” she says, “a round stone and a kind of small standing stone. The pair seems to me to be a symbol of regeneration, or a wish for help in harvest, or related to worship of the nature god. It’s probably a primitive stage of shintoism.”

Seven Light Bay will incorporate the Sun Pillar and Moon Stone. The pillar will be erected this month atop two pyramidal rocks in the bay. Originally, the plan was to carry it there in a large boat, but it was feared that the area’s precious coral would be harmed.

“Instead of placing this work in the city, I wanted to place it in the most rich nature, so that people have to travel to actually get in touch with nature and to understand that you are also the nature as well,” says Mori, who spends most of her time in New York. “I like these very ambitious projects—it’s my soul work—but my life work is to interact with the people in the city.”

The exhibition, organized by The Costume Institute, celebrates the late Alexander McQueen’s extraordinary contributions to fashion. From his Central Saint Martins postgraduate collection of 1992 to his final runway presentation, which took place after his death in February 2010, Mr. McQueen challenged and expanded the understanding of fashion beyond utility to a conceptual expression of culture, politics, and identity. His iconic designs constitute the work of an artist whose medium of expression was fashion.

The Romantic Mind

Coat
Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims (MA Graduation Collection), 1992
Pink silk satin printed in thorn pattern lined in white silk with encapsulated human hair

“You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.”
—Alexander McQueen

McQueen doggedly promoted freedom of thought and expression and championed the authority of the imagination. In so doing, he was an exemplar of the Romantic individual, the hero-artist who staunchly follows the dictates of his inspiration. “What I am trying to bring to fashion is a sort of originality,” he said. McQueen expressed this originality most fundamentally through his methods of cutting and construction, which were both innovative and revolutionary.

Romantic Gothic and Cabinet of Curiosities

“Coiled” Corset
The Overlook, autumn/winter 1999–2000
Aluminum

One of the defining features of McQueen’s collections is their historicism. While McQueen’s historical references are far-reaching, he was particularly inspired by the nineteenth century, especially the Victorian Gothic.Like the Victorian Gothic, which combines elements of horror and romance, McQueen’s collections often reflect opposites such as life and death, lightness and darkness. Indeed, the emotional intensity of his runway presentations was frequently the consequence of the interplay between dialectical oppositions. The relationship between victim and aggressor was especially apparent, particularly in his accessories. He once remarked, “I . . . like the accessory for its sadomasochistic aspect.”

Romantic Nationalism

Dress
The Horn of Plenty, autumn/winter 2009–10
Black duck feathers

McQueen’s collections were fashioned around elaborate narratives that are profoundly autobiographical, often reflecting his Scottish heritage. Indeed, when he was asked what his Scottish roots meant to him, he replied, “Everything.” McQueen’s national pride is most evident in the collections Highland Rape (autumn/winter 1995–96) and Widows of Culloden (autumn/winter 2006–7). Both explore Scotland’s turbulent political history.

Romantic Exoticism

Ensemble
No. 13, spring/summer 1999
Corset of brown leather; skirt of cream silk lace; prosthetic legs of carved elm wood

“I want to be honest about the world that we live in, and sometimes my political persuasions come through in my work. Fashion can be really racist, looking at the clothes of other cultures as costumes. . . . That’s mundane and it’s old hat. Let’s break down some barriers.”
—Alexander McQueen

McQueen’s romantic sensibilities expanded his imaginary horizons not only temporally but also geographically. As it had been for Romantic artists and writers, the lure of the exotic was central to his work. Like his historicism, McQueen’s was wide ranging—India, China, Africa, and Turkey all sparked his imagination. Japan was particularly significant to him, both thematically and stylistically. The kimono, especially, was a garment that he reconfigured endlessly. Remarking on the direction of his fashions, McQueen said, “My work will be about taking elements of traditional embroidery, filigree, and craftsmanship from countries all over the world. I will explore their crafts, patterns, and materials and interpret them in my own way.” As with many of his themes, however, McQueen’s exoticism was often expressed in contrasting opposites. That was the case with It’s Only a Game (spring/summer 2005), a show staged as a chess game inspired by a scene in the film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), which pitched the East (Japan) against the West (America). Films often inspired McQueen, as did contemporary art.

Romantic Primitivism

Dress
It’s Only a Game, spring/summer 2005
Lilac leather and horsehair

“I try to push the silhouette. To change the silhouette is to change the thinking of how we look. What I do is look at ancient African tribes, and the way they dress. The rituals of how they dress. . . . There’s a lot of tribalism in the collections.”
—Alexander McQueen

Throughout his career, McQueen returned to the theme of primitivism, which drew upon the ideal of the noble savage living in harmony with the natural world. It was the focus of his first runway collection after graduating, Nihilism (spring/summer 1994). He said of the collection, “It was a reaction to designers romanticizing ethnic dressing, like a Masai-inspired dress made of materials the Masai could never afford.” It famously included a latex dress with locusts, McQueen’s statement on famine. Many of the pieces were coated with mud, a conceit the designer repeated in Eshu (autumn/winter 2000–2001), a collection inspired by the well-known deity in the Yoruba religion. The clothes, including a coat of black synthetic hair and a dress of black horsehair embroidered with yellow glass beads, came close to fetishizing materials. This fetishization also occurred in It’s a Jungle Out There (autumn/winter 1997–98), which was inspired by the Thomson’s gazelle. The collection was a meditation on the dynamics of power—in particular, the relationship between predator and prey. Indeed, McQueen’s reflections on primitivism were frequently represented in paradoxical combinations, contrasting “modern” and “primitive,” “civilized” and “uncivilized.” The storyline of Irere (spring/summer 2003) involved a shipwreck at sea and was peopled with pirates, conquistadors, and Amazonian Indians. Typically, McQueen’s narrative glorified the state of nature and tipped the moral balance in favor of the “natural man” or “nature’s gentleman” unfettered by the artificial constructs of civilization.

Romantic Naturalism

“Spine” Corset
Untitled, spring/summer 1998
Aluminum and black leather

Nature was the greatest, or at least the most enduring, influence upon McQueen. It was also a central theme, if not the central theme, of Romanticism. Many artists of the Romantic movement presented nature itself as a work of art. McQueen both shared and promoted this view in his collections, which often included fashions that took their forms and raw materials from the natural world. For McQueen, as it was for the Romantics, nature was also a locus for ideas and concepts. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), it presented a narrative that centered not on the evolution of humankind but on its devolution. For the Romantics, nature was the primary vehicle for the Sublime—starry skies, stormy seas, turbulent waterfalls, vertiginous mountains. In Plato’s Atlantis, the Sublime of nature was paralleled and supplanted by that of technology—the extreme space-time compressions produced by the Internet. It was a powerful evocation of the Sublime and its coincident expression of the Romantic and the postmodern. At the same time, it was a potent vision of the future of fashion that reflected McQueen’s sweeping imagination.

Ensemble
Eclect Dissect, autumn/winter 1997–98
Dress of black leather; collar of red pheasant feathers and resin vulture skulls; gloves of black leather

Nicola Costantino was born in Rosario on November 17, 1964. While she attended the course of Fine Arts at the National University in Rosario, her interest in new artistic materials and techniques led her to research and work in craft workshops and factories. At ICI Duperial, she experimented with silicone molds and matrices on polyester resin apt for flexible polyurethane foam injection. Her skill in this technique proved decisive for the development of her work, and enabled her to achieve the real-object perception that would become characteristic of Nicola’s art. Since she was a teenager, Nicola had worked in her mother’s clothing factory. In that world of fashion, she developed her skill in clothing designs and patterns. In 1990, the rest of her family moved to Chile.

In 1995 she started to experiment with an almost exact copy of human skin made in silicone that she used for the production of her clothing. Also, she made her first coat with navels and human hair, which she herself wore during her frequent trips to New York and Los Angeles. Fashion, a topic that had been present throughout her life -along with consumption and the human body as a tool of seduction-, has finally become a recurrent theme in her work.

In 2003, she started her project Savon de Corps, with soaps made with a part of her own fat obtained from a liposuction. She held a solo exhibit of her Boutique at Senda Gallery, in Barcelona’s Paseo de Gracia, a street where the world’s most glamorous clothing brands are based, and other exhibition with her whole work at Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca, both in Spain.