You look for it, but it seldom comes–namely, output of a reflective warrior! In addition to Iris Van Herpen’s decade on the wild side, there is the second shock that the young Dutch visionary is a doyen of haute couture, not a field generally consulted for avant-garde investigation getting into the face of quantum physics dogmatists.

Iris Van Herpen, who, in a video at her current show in the Royal Ontario Museum alludes to having a background in “dance,” offers to us an advanced display of a dimension of dynamics never noticed in mainstream reasoning (but alive and well in cutting-edge thought and art). The fashion designs on tap here, feature compositions overrunning the apparel to the point of offshoots complementing the body per se, and thereby questioning the “identity” itself. This evocation pertains to the wearer’s alertness so far as engendering a field of energy interacting with oneself. Consequently, the compositions vividly evoke that expansion of the human into the cosmos.

This rigorous, mysterious and consequential artistry is supplemented by designers, engineers and architects with a genius for producing mechanisms responsive to one’s motions, and thereby eliciting responses from us. Particularly important to Van Herpen’s productions has been Toronto architect, Philip Beesley, a renowned builder of body-motion constructs as to a crucial space we all belong to, but seldom recognize.

(A sub-text of this work consists of Beesley et al regarding such innovations as rife with utopian, “artificial-intelligence” dividends, while the lady who knows better tends to darkness as well as light.)

Continue reading →