RACHEL FERBER
OCTOBER 1 - 29, 2021
Moving between multiple bodies of work, my practice combines video, sculpture, performance, and garment and textile design. These endeavors inform each other and are united through their connection to my background in marketing and branding, as well as a preoccupation with the complicated ways that this language of consumption affects human experience. My work is ultimately rooted in a desire for alternatives. I intend to make a mess of what I know—to return to a more raw state. This process begins from a place of observation and questioning. My inquiry finds inspiration in the oppressive nature of design and aesthetics, gender norms, and sociopolitical structures. Playing, testing, and prodding become the means to unlearn the rules of society, and to explore notions of autonomy and value. I (un)learn through (un)making, and through (re)making. This corporeal research is supported by feminist, environmental, and media theory, as well as the study of clowning and mime.
BYOB—a fictitious ‘holistic lifestyle brand’—is my largest body of work to date. Performed via objects, garments, and videos, I use the framework of the brand toquestion established systems, and the place of the individual within them. Through videos that function somewhere between online cooking tutorial, DIY household repair, mundane social media post, and product or fashion ad, the imagery generated by BYOB is at once alien and familiar; scenes of domestic ideals are distorted. Sounds are heightened—composed entirely through foley—and sometimes cartoonish. Acts of self-care and wellness become uncomfortable. Used domestic textiles are transformed into strangely chic garments reminiscent of west coast cool kids, cult robes, pajamas, and spa attire. Likewise, the interiors of this space employ the minimal birch aesthetic of popular Scandinavian furniture. It is overwhelmingly beige, dangerously bland, an almost sickly neutral space that might be confused for the comforts of home. Using my own beige body, I implicate myself and question my role in the proliferation of the aspirational imagery that informs my critique.
This is the image of an environment that exists between the commercial and the private. The blurring of the line between these spaces mirrors the real commodification of objects, lifestyles, and bodies alike. It renders the absurdity of the everyday both fact and fiction, and any distinction between these dualities leaky, floppy, and smudged. Irreverence and Humor then become the means to sincerity, and vice versa. I’m interested in the precariousness of making oneself the punchline. Can the perceived act of foolishness become a means of undermining power and reclaiming autonomy? Where does the performance begin and end? And to what degree am I myself just another power structure to disrupt?
Alongside this body of work, I facilitate an occasional experimental dye project called THE DYE BATH. Each bath consists of a rotating natural dye made from a variety of domestic materials. Past dyes have included grass clippings, cooking oil, red wine, coffee, and turmeric—materials often responsible for unwanted blemishes on our garments, which propel them to the end of their life cycle. THE DYE BATH challenges this negative perception of stains by embracing these marks as subversive acts of rebellion. To wear a stain is to challenge common perceptions of presentability. As I continue to expand on these themes, subcultures, and hxstories, I find myself in a transitional state in which these bodies of work are merging into a single, focused endeavor. I am moving away from the restrictiveness of the brand to engage these ideas through a more diverse set of forms and at larger scales. Radical natural dyeing is becoming a more integrated part of my video process, and issues of sustainability and Environmental Justice are top of mind. My recent work more explicitly moves between the real and the constructed in order to further investigate the absurdities of our performed reality, and to look for other options.
