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Watch the Gap: The Shock of Application and Wolves in Sheep's Clothing Main Menu

The Hidden Tensions in the Gap

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Anitra Hamilton’s work invokes the hidden tensions between what we know and what we are willing to collectively acknowledge, revealing with her meticulously decorated decoys the discrepancy between personal awareness and public discourse. (Zerubavel, 3) For instance, we mask our propensity toward violence by celebrating war in military parades or simply by wearing poppies on Remembrance Day. We disguise our impulse to dominate and control by calling it nationalism, and by donning national symbols or folkloric costumes to innocently express it. These very clothes are used to simultaneously hide and reveal. Sartorial signs speak very clearly about identity, class, and culture without actually having to say a word. Yet clothes protect us from being completely exposed, signs too. Clothing, after all, is the perfect cover up—and the perfect subject for Hamilton’s work. Clothing lends itself to manipulation and distortion, strategies the artist deploy and ornament with her candy-coated truths and linguistic puns.

She’s sneaky like that. We might call her a wolf in sheep’s clothing—but let’s not confuse our cautionary tales. Co-opting is, after all, the perfect cover up for confusion.

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A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing Emelie Chhangur
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Works Cited Emelie Chhangur
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Tracht Suit Emelie Chhangur In The Emperor’s New Clothes, it is the desire to differentiate, to stratify, and to separate that, in part, seduces the King into wanting the invisible fabric that only some can see. “These must, indeed, be splendid clothes!" thought the Emperor. "Had I such a suit, I might at once find out what men in my realms are unfit for their office, and also be able to distinguish the wise from the foolish! This stuff must be woven for me immediately.” (Anderson, n.pag) In fact, the invisible clothes construct a system of identification as bogus as the class structure on which the society is based. In her (unrealized) project Tracht Suit, Hamilton proposed to precisely replicate the Tracht, the traditional folkloric costume, of Bavaria. (In Bavaria, this is a dirndl for women and lederhosen for men). Replacing the custom-woven fabric, lace, and embroidery work of the traditional costumes that differ from region to region with the ever-popular, grey fleece fabric used to make the ubiquitous North American tracksuit, each Tracht in Tracht Suit would be treated the same. Her title says it all. Mixing the traditional with the popular—opening up the folkloric to the free market—she attempted to “update” the Tracht and open up the possibilities of its usability across generations and geographies while erasing the local specificities of the original suit. But as Globalization expands, the reinforcement of local identity follows. Hamilton’s proposal makes visible the signs that we have come to take for granted as being positive expressions of cultural belonging as forms of cultural exclusion, as the artist puts it, “we are from here and you are not.” (Hamilton) No wonder her project remains unrealized.

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1. The Hidden Tensions in the Gap Anitra Hamilton’s work invokes the hidden tensions between what we know and what we are willing to collectively acknowledge, revealing with her meticulously decorated decoys the discrepancy between personal awareness and public discourse. (Zerubavel, 3) For instance, we mask our propensity toward violence by celebrating war in military parades or simply by wearing poppies on Remembrance Day. We disguise our impulse to dominate and control by calling it nationalism, and by donning national symbols or folkloric costumes to innocently express it. These very clothes are used to simultaneously hide and reveal. Sartorial signs speak very clearly about identity, class, and culture without actually having to say a word. Yet clothes protect us from being completely exposed, signs too. Clothing, after all, is the perfect cover up—and the perfect subject for Hamilton’s work. Clothing lends itself to manipulation and distortion, strategies the artist deploy and ornament with her candy-coated truths and linguistic puns.
  
  She’s sneaky like that. We might call her a wolf in sheep’s clothing—but let’s not confuse our cautionary tales. Co-opting is, after all, the perfect cover up for confusion.
  
  Work Cited

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Anitra Hamiton, Blue Balls, 1999. Cannonballs, robin and starling eggshells, glue. 3” H x 3” W. Courtesy of the artist and Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto.