BodyDressCity

As part of my Masters in Spatial Design titled Polyrhythmic Landscapes BodyDressCity, I created a 10 meter long red dress. After my thesis I continued to do performances. I’ve performed as part of Cuba Dupa; Red Dress Performance, at the Performance Arcade; Big Weather, a short film titled Hustler, Tongues of Stone in Perth and held an exhibition of the dress at the Prague Quadrennial
of Performance Design and Space.

Lauren Skogstad explores the disruptive monumentality of a female figure wearing an extraordinary red dress of epic proportions, as she encounters the everyday world of the city.

The wearer of the dress inescapably undergoes a metamorphosis to become a character from a fantastic, dream-like or folkloric world – and simultaneously, as we witness the spectacle of the dress, the world of our imaginations fuses temporarily with the world of the everyday.

There is something fundamentally synchronous between Lauren’s work and the city of Wellington – it is as though she has pierced the skin of the city to reveal its bloody interior, alive and pulsing, as she wanders, an exotic flâneuse, through its heart.

Framed by the black uniformed workers in the CBD, the monumental dress becomes extra vivid, acquires greater dramatic potential to change the way we think about ourselves as city-dwellers and to add to the vocabulary of cool when thinking about ways to describe the city of Wellington where such sights are made possible.

Wrapped, mummy-like, she is Palaeolithic, a 30,000-year-old Willendorf Venus, referencing the oldest sculpture on the planet, but alive and present, she is unignorably contemporary

Maybe, under electric skies, the glamour of the night-time city is the least startled at the sight of this monumental feminine.

Review by Val Diggle