Great news! Faction, the homage exhibition to Diana Vreeland, is extending until the 9th of October at Melet Merchantile, 84 Wooster Street, Suite 202, New York.
Make an appointment at desk@meletmerchantile.com
Don’t miss it!
xx
I have been planning this exhibition for over 2 years and I’m happy to share it with you now. It is a homage to Diana Vreeland. Her contribution to the fashion industry is what is mostly known of her but I wanted to focus on her personality. I fell in love with her when I read her memoirs the first time. I discovered an extremely witty and exaggerated aspect of her which I adored immediately. I began reading everything I could find on her and I felt I started getting to know her even more. What caught my attention the most was her inability of seeing ugliness, she saw the world with a beautiful filter. She was a big believer in unconventional beauty. I also loved how she would write on her diary to improve herself, making collages of her hanging out with people she admired, art directing her future life since the beginning. I’m a great believer in this way of thinking and I felt so identified with her. I felt it was perfect to transmit what I believe in through a person like Diana Vreeland. I started by studying her very closely, she had such a unique manner of speech and very dramatic manerisms in general. I painted her from video footage and also from found photographs in every medium I could, pencil, charcoal, watercolor, oil, and gouache. I wanted to be able to draw her with my eyes closed. I chose to focus on her own memoirs, interpreting some of my favorite anecdotes. She loved to exaggerate and embellish reality, all of her stories are simply wonderful. Faction is what I called the exhibition because that is how she described her memoires, a combination of fact and fiction.
I like to think of the result as a combination of her imagination and mine.
Photo by Carla Tramullas
