11
3-ply x Centre for Style x
Monica's Gallery with Jessie Kiely
HEROES – Fanfiction
Softcover, 68pp, 235mm x 300mm, offset
Edition of 1000
Editors: Fayen d’Evie, Matthew Linde,
Spencer Lai and Jake Swinson
Design: Toby Tam
Published by 3-ply, 2016
ISBN 978-0-9946103-0-0
RRP AUD 25.00
Contents include a feature text “The Banquet” by Monicas’s Gallery with Jessie Kiely, and image contributions from: Adam Wood, Anna-Sophie Berger, Aurelia Guo, Brendan Morris, Bror August, Caley Feeney, Chloé Elizabeth Maratta, Claire Barrow, D&K, Dara Allen, Eric Mack, Galen Erickson thanks to Matthew Drury, Callum Hawke, Oscar Khan and Arthur Marie, George Egerton-Warbuton, Giovanna Flores, Grace Anderson, H.B. Peace, Hamishi Farah, Hana Earles, Harry Burke, Jake Levy, Jessie Kiely, Joseph Geagan, Josey Kidd-Crowe, Kate Meakin, Kulisek-Lieske, Laura Fanning, Matty Bovan, Mel Paget, Milo Conroy, Misty Pollen, Nora Slade and Peter Guffield Linden, Rafael Delacruz, Rare Candy, Richard Malone, Ruth O’Leary, Ryohei Kawanishi, Sasha Geyer, Shahan Assadourian, Sophie Hardeman, Spencer Lai, Stefan Schwartzman, and Wiley Guillot.
Initiated by 3-ply and Centre for Style, HEROES conflates the artist book and the fashion magazine. The ‘hero look’ is a term used to describe the penultimate outfit of a designer’s collection. Often the most conceptually-driven moment of the runway, the hero outfit serves as a signpost for a designer’s signature style, not quotidian wearability. For this inaugural issue of HEROES, contributors were invited to approach the act of fashion design as a narrative of fanfiction, identifying as readers and fans of their own canon to generate a character or caricature of their personal style. With timeframes restricted to a day, techniques of assemblage and improvisation were privileged, as contributors constructed visceral manifestations of subjectivity through self-fashioned hero looks.
HEROES/Fanfiction includes a feature text “The Banquet” written by Monica’s Gallery with Jessie Kiely, that opens: “ACT I. It was within the candle-lit caverns beneath the wondrous castle bestowed upon The Fat Baron Oörif that the banquet took place. The air thick with magic…” Appropriating the fanfiction trope as a codified lookbook, the text weaves elaborate descriptions of characters and fantastical sub-plots, over the course of a banquet hosted for fifteen guests by a former trade tycoon, within his castle of soft provincial feel. Spiralling through philosophical, intersubjective and social commentary, this parallel universe lookbook interlaces acute reflections on meta-trends, personal freedoms and nested human artefacts.
HEROES was initiated as a collaborative contribution to TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation, which considers the confluence and congruence between biennial exhibitions and serial publications: both are editions, but with contrasting modes of circulation. In HEROES, the merging of diverse fashion-producers within a single publication exploits the possibilities of publication as a curatorial form, proliferating and diversifying participation within the biennial, while leveling a horizontal hierarchy. However, crucially, the magazine has been conceived as an independent publication that will transcend the spatial and temporal boundaries of the biennial, through 3-ply’s distribution networks and archiving interventions. From this expanded vantage, the opening event of Endless Circulation at the scenic country estate of TarraWarra Museum of Art could be parasitically co-opted as a lavish, externally publicised and generously catered launch for HEROES.
During the opening of Endless Circulation, the feature text from HEROES by Monica’s Gallery and Jessie Kiely mutated into a feature presentation of a fashion collection by Kiely, interacting with a performative wall installation designed and hand-decorated by Monica’s Gallery. Kiely’s looks were developed using a number generator algorithm in conjunction with fashion industry trend magazines from 2012–14. Following the launch, documentation from the performance will be produced as an A3 risograph poster, which will be included as a folded insert within 200 distribution copies of HEROES.
Photography credit for HEROES magazine object (covers and sample spreads shown left): Christo Crocker.
Launched 19/20 August 2016 @ TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation, TarraWarra Museum of Art.
3-ply gratefully acknowledges the support of TarraWarra Museum of Art, the Australia Council, Creative Victoria, and the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture of Monash University.