tracciamenti: Dress #30

Dress #30, by tracciamenti.
15% of the sale of this print goes to Teach For America.

tracciamenti is the screen name of a 47-year old artist who lives in Italy. She is an architect by training, but hasn't worked as an architect since she was 20. In her twenties and thirties, she lived in Venice, where she attended university and worked as a graphic designer and as a freelance tableware designer for several Italian companies. For a short period, she also worked as a fashion designer in Milano, interrupting her studies briefly. She has studied and worked in several foreign cities (New York City, Buenos Aires, Lisbon, and in Guatemala). In 2003, she moved to a city in the north of Italy, where she teaches at a public school.

Visual work silently accompanies tracciamenti's life, but recently she has reduced the number of exhibitions and public activities that she participates in, communicating mainly through the web. She believes more in mutual exchange than in the value of shopping, although even she knows that a perfect world is not possible, and continues to sell her artwork on occasion.



About the print:
I made this artwork in 2009 after reading some lines in a magazine about decorations on haute couture dresses. They are made using the labor of young women living in far eastern countries, whose very small hands are able to make incredibly complicated embroidering. Dress #30 is a completely digital drawing and consists of a vector illustration that was then elaborated upon in Photoshop.

This is a digital print on acid free, Neenah uncoated matte 100lb cover paper that is 80% recycled. It was digitally signed by the artist and was numbered by The Working Proof.

PURCHASE $30!

What is the typical process behind your work?
I don't have any rules about making sketches of my final pieces. Sometimes I help myself with some words and color notes, other times I'll do a quick drawing in my Moleskine. In the case of Dress #30, there was no process piece - after reading an article in the newspaper about far eastern workers employed in the fashion business, I imagined the artwork as it is.

What has inspired you recently?
In the last two years, I have mainly worked with dresses as a subject, but have avoided using fashion as a reference. I always try to express something directly from my personal condition or am inspired by what I see and read. I often use pieces of poems and sentences that I take from essays – I can hardly imagine my visual works separated from the importance of words.

The dresses in my artworks are intended as a structure and a vehicle for different kinds of verity, even if this important concept (verity) sounds so big and distant when compared to my drawings! The final goal is to make people think about something that is not directly connected with dresses themselves - rather with peculiar aspects of the human condition. Sadly, most people consider my artworks as merely decorative and fashionable research, while in reality they are exactly the opposite.

Why did you choose to pair Teach For America with your print?
Pairing my work with a charity gives a different and better meaning to the use we make of money. At the same time, it turns attention to more important themes that we should never forget.



How have you seen art transform the world around you?
I don't trust so much in the word "art" as we use it in recent times. I think that nowadays substance and quality have been substituted for quantity. Making something pleasant is very easy, but in most cases, we have lost the capacity to produce artworks so high in quality that they can challenge the passing of time and deeply transform the world.

If you could pick one artist to mentor you, who would it be?
For very different reasons I would have liked Francis Bacon or Andy Wahrol to have been my mentoring artists, even if this is just a crazy, intellectual fantasy.

Who are some artists you think people should know about?
As you can imagine, my inspirations are not constant but change frequently over time, following my goals and circumstances. Everyday I browse many different works of art through the web, of famous and unknown artists. In general, I feel attracted by artistic works that provoke an intellectual and moral conflict in myself, and that don't represent a merely aesthetic inspiration. But this can be hard to transmit to others, because it is a strictly personal feeling.

In the last few years, I have particularly appreciated the work of Miranda July and the early productions of Richard Prince, but I often study and follow the work of masters which are pretty far from my personal style - for example, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Christian Boltansky. In general, I must say that any artistic activity should be accompanied by a constant and critical form of study and investigation, not only in the art field.