Not for Sale

For some reason I just remembered this amazing dress Cat Chow made several years ago, constructed of 1000 $1 bills donated to her by 1000 people (including me):


It's displayed with a list of the names of the 1000 donors and is called Not for Sale. Her work requires such painstaking, highly skilled craftship and she creates these amazing well-formed pieces of clothing that manage to gracefully convey a "message" (something art usually does so clumsily and which I normally think is stupid and pointless). For instance, she's made wedding dresses called "Bonded" out of a single piece of 100-foot long coiled zipper:


This dress is made from measuring tape:


And here is a picture of Cat (real name Catherine) wearing it:


She has just scads of other amazing things, like chainmail made of not just shredded dollars, but also of photographic slides and of snaps joined together by little metal rings. And look at the form of these dresses:


I always just make things to solve a problem -- way way way more craft than art. It just blows my mind the way people use traditional crafting techniques and ideas to make real art. I mean, yes, of course, I know that craft-making is seen as less than art-making because the former was typically done by women and considered the latter only when done by men and that maybe it's inherently anti-woman to draw the distinction. But look at those fucking dresses!