WCA International Caucus/UN Program Honor Roll
Monday, 11 March, 2024
WCA International Caucus/UN Program Honour Roll 2023/2024 Awardee: Daria Dorosh
Art to Wear Sweater Photo: Daria Dorosh
Daria Dorosh is an artist, researcher, and educator working in the fields of art, fashion, and technology. Born in Ukraine, she has been living and working in New York City and in her upstate studio since 1950. In her art practice of 50 years, she has produced 23 one person exhibitions and a diverse body of work that includes painting, photography, and sculpture, as well as public art, digital prints, video, art to wear, and interactive installations. She is active in public events and brings her multidisciplinary network of collaborators into her art projects to investigate contemporary issues affecting art and culture.
I create spaces to inhabit, both imaginary and tangible. My work varies in medium and scale because I live in a time in which change has been the only constant.
FIT installation: Story rugs, Chanel hoodie reconstruction
INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATIONS AND THEIR IMPACT ON BEING AN ARTIST
After graduating from Cooper Union in 1968, Dorosh started her work as a full time artist while teaching fashion at the Fashion Institute of Technology and fine art at Parsons School of Design. She has had a lifelong relationship with FIT, first as a student in 1961, then as a faculty member in 1969, and completed the circle by donating her personal art and fashion documents in 2016 to the Special Collections archive in the Gladys Marcus Library at FIT.
In August 2023, she was invited by Karen Jamison Trivette, Head of Special Collections and College Archives@FIT, to co-curate a show for FIT’s 80th anniversary that juxtaposed the work of Max Meyer, a founder of FIT, with her artwork that crossed the boundary between fashion and art. The double show contrasted two centuries through art, fashion, technology, video, and a botanical scent created by artist Gayil Nalls for the installation. In "Unconventional: Then, Now, and Always: A Helix of FIT Influence from Max Meyer to Daria Dorosh", she playfully connected the fashion drawings Meyer commissioned for licensing couture in the last century to her one-of-a-kind art works:
He took a unique and made it a multiple, whereas I take a multiple and make it unique.
Dorosh chose her artworks from 2004 - 2023 that move out of the last century into the current one. She highlighted repurposing as art process, street fashion as influencer, the mobile culture of disposability, collaboration, and a composite of fashion videos she made on her cell phones over the years. She created an interactive area for the public to make their own designs and gave three workshops. The two-gallery installation of art, archival material, and technology, spoke about innovation, women, privilege, the rise of new media and mass entertainment in the last century and how it has played out in the present one.
The Max Meyer tribute was represented by fifteen life-size fashion sketches from Abraham Beller and Company, with restored garments chosen by Karen Jamison Trivette. They emanated a 1920s elegance and a time when women began to assert their independence. Dorosh’s generation of feminists continued that progression, and in 1968, she and artist Sandy Gellis joined a bus load of New York Radical Women to picket the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City.
PhD Grid Chair sculpture, Daria Dorosh
NEW HORIZONS AND BACK TO SCHOOL
At the conclusion my full-time teaching career, I enrolled in a practice-based PhD program, SMARTlab, at Central St. Martins in London.
Dorosh’s dissertation investigated two binary patterns occurring across her fields of art, fashion, and technology. "Patterning: the informatics of art and fashion", (2007) demonstrated that the binaries of the Grid/Loop and Abstraction/Representation operated in art, fashion, and digital culture, and that their presence indicated a transition from a product-based culture to a process-oriented one. She had met Lizbeth Goodman, the director of SMARTlab, at Siggraph2003, a technology conference, and invited her to participate in her 2004 exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery, "Plays Well with Others".
A total of 13 guest artists, educators, game designers, programmers, scientists, theorists, and social activists joined her in exploring the unique dynamics of spherical globe projection by creating work for the globe and participating in various aspects of the exhibition. The installation consisted of: 13 clothing ball sculptures she made from their clothing, with sound by Clilly Castiglia and scent by Gayil Nalls; inkjet prints; a video projection on the 60” OmniGlobe®, a self-contained spherical display system from ARC Science Simulations. For her art exhibition in 2010," jump-off", Dorosh dismantled an early 20th c. chair and repurposed it to archive her PhD thesis. A green Plexiglas seat holds the thesis; the “painting” in the backrest is made from sewn textiles that echo her early paintings; and she painted the wooden chair frame with Golden acrylic paint, completing the journey from art to thesis and back to art.
She continues her association with SMARTlab as adjunct faculty at University College Dublin. "Take Back your Body" was both a presentation and published essay at VSMM2017, a conference on virtual and enhanced reality systems held in Dublin. In 2018, her art exhibition of the same tittle at A.I.R. honoured the ancient Goddess culture of Ireland, in which her "Watercolours and Wearables" presented watercolours as armatures for ceremonial textile neckwear that offered a postmodernist choice: art to be worn and/or art on the wall.
The aphorism, ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it too’’ no longer applies in the information age.
REVOLUTION BECOMES INSTITUTION AND BACK REVOLUTION BECOMES INSTITUTION AND BACK
While teaching to support her studio practice, Dorosh became one of 20 women artists who co-founded A.I.R. Gallery in 1972. It was the first artist-led, not-for-profit arts organization in the United States established to exhibit art by women at a time when women were invisible in the arts. In 2023 the gallery celebrated its 50th anniversary, which coincided with her 50 year tenure at AIR. A.I.R. has been my research space, and the body of work I produced in my 23 one-person shows is about art crossing two centuries, one analogue and one digital.In addition to exhibiting their work at AIR, artist can initiate and work together on projects that they believe are important for their art and the art community.
In 2020, Dorosh and artist member Yvonne Shortt started a friendship and dialogue about conventional art practices inherited from the last century that were a barrier to understanding the present context of art as well as imagining a future for artists. In their Research and Development project, they test and document their art research and share their findings with others through social media and on the A.I.R. website. Some of their investigations have highlighted the many untapped spaces available for presenting art, artists self-starting, self-funding, and self-archiving their work.
DARK BEAUTY AND SHELTERING IN PLACE IN 2020
My life partner, artist John Tomlinson and I had our first exhibition at the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance in Narrowsburg, NY as two artists working side by side for more than 50 years. "Dark Beauty" showed the current work and a visual record of the artists’ adjacent studios in four different locations since 1969. The installation emanated anxiety about the political and environmental concerns of the time and was reflected in the titles of the work, such as Tomlinson’s "You have seven minutes" and Dorosh’s "Cry ocean, Cry planet, Cry human". She showed seven sculptures in wood and textiles, and six large digital prints with hand-drawn maps of data on water, plastics, temperatures, and other issues of global impact.
Tomlinson’s figurative graphite drawings showed our preoccupation with the cell phone while missing the dangerous state of the planet. Invited guest artists added their presence to the theme. Poet Karen Morris gave a talk on "Dark Beauty, Duende, and Art as Social Dream", Noah Kalina contributed a double portrait of the artists in their studio, and sound artist Marc Switko created a deep frequency undercurrent on the gong. It was the last show at DVAA before Covid -19 shut down most public events for an unknown duration.
Dark Beauty, installation view. Photo: Noah Kalina
Dark Beauty Installation. Photo: Daria Dorosh
GOING FORWARD
Her central project underway is "Be the Museum", in which an artist’s studio includes the context surrounding the artist’s life. Indoor and outdoor space become a single environment where art is created within an interdependent community of people, plants and animals. In this fluid framework without walls, her activity, relationships, and objects become part of art as medium, context, and information.
Another initiative, "Be the Archive", seeks to spark a new relationship between art and culture by partnering with professionals and institutions that are engaged in preserving culture. She continues to make art that responds to an ever-changing present, one that she believes is moving toward a future that is built on collaboration. In her current studio work she is working with colour as a property of light in which anyone can generate their own pattern based on her structure.
Timeline, collage of one of four shared studios with John Tomlinson 1988-1999. Photo: Daria Dorosh