Isabelle Wenzel's Stand Up Sculptures

Isabelle Wenzel is another artist who (like Melinda Gibson in the previous post) participated in Brad Feuerhelm's call out for investigations into his archive.

Wenzel also investigates the female body and how it is represented in fashion and how dress, posture and function are used to distort and depersonalise in traditional female jobs and roles.

She used to be an acrobat/contortionist so all the pictures here are also self-portraits; and they are a check-list of various fashion tropes (starting with Guy Bourdin) which gives them a life and makes them both funny and subversive. They're performance, still life, sculpture, political commentary and stand-up all in one. And they look fantastic.

Add to that the low-tech way that she makes her pictures, using a self-release button on a Canon G12 (that might have changed by now). She sticks it on a tripod and then dashes into place to get the shot in the 10 seconds available. And if she doesn't get it she does it again... and again... and again...

More on that here.

And here's a video of her posing and if you go here (Just after 5 minutes in), there's a video of her actually making pictures - "Everything I did before was stupid. And this is also kind of stupid... but there is something interesting." Tremendous!