Pre-Packaged Couture: High Fashion, Great Value!
On Display at The Gateway now through May.
The exhibition Pre-Packaged Couture: High Fashion, Great Value! is a hand-sewn haute couture fashion line made entirely from various types of repurposed plastic bags and packaging by Utah artist, Adah Bennion. Presented as a series of window displays, the exhibition Pre-Packaged Couture: High Fashion, Great Value! seeks to define the subjective demarcation of material value while examining the lifespan and reusability of materials and waste generated on a daily basis by a consumer society obsessed with single-use products, convenience, and fast fashion. Mimicking those worn by celebrities at the Met Gala, these repurposed plastic garments probe at both the absurdity, spectacle, beauty, excess, time, energy, and material resources that go into extreme luxury and fashion, and the banal luxury of immediacy and convenience as a means to highlight the pervasive invisibility of the plastic that brings us our daily bread and that is seemingly encasing our very lives.
About the Materials:
Pre-Packaged Couture: High Fashion, Great Value! features luxury-inspired clothes made from locally sourced repurposed plastic bags, packaging, and containers that have been collected from various Salt Lake City communities. All materials used to make this fashion line and the displays were collected by the artist and would have otherwise ended up in the landfill. Pre-Packaged Couture: High Fashion, Great Value! asks us to reevaluate our relationship to the materials we interact with daily and invites us to reimagine their potential and possibilities of the everyday materials around us.
About the Artist:
Born and raised in central Utah, Adah Bennion is an interdisciplinary artist whose work engages processes of traditional craft and fiber to form intimate and explorative relationships with materials over protracted lengths of dedicated time and intention. Utilizing these relationships between materiality and embodied processes as conduits for meaning, Bennion explores how ideas of tradition, lineage, and inheritance influence and determine our complex relationships to objects and memory; our fears of being forgotten. Also fascinated by the prospective evolutional arcs of made materials in geologic time, Bennion’s work imagines the spawn of adaptive material relationships and chimeric ecologies of a post-anthropocentric world, which manifest as bizarre, yet appealing, juxtapositions of material and form, suggestive of a strange hybridization of traditional craft processes and material over time.
Bennion graduates from the University of Utah in May of 2023 with a BFA in Sculpture Intermedia, after which she plans to continue to pursue this line of creative work and research at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA while earning her Masters of Fine Art. To learn more about Adah and to see more of her work, visit www.adahbennion.com or follow @adahbennion on Instagram.