In the world of fashion, glamour is defined one way. The women wear what they are told to wear, not what they choose to wear. The audiences they are trying to please are fashion critics and people with lots of money, who look at the dresses not always as attire but often as artistic investments. These are not audiences the models choose on their own.
Barry Rosenberg defines glamour another way.
“People are competitive in how they dress. You dress for an audience. Everybody has a different audience and some people are better at it than others,” Rosenberg said. “Glamour is like someone being the absolute best in the eyes of an audience they care about, who they want to relate to, who their personal community is.”
Rosenberg, the director of the Contemporary Art Galleries at UConn in Storrs, has curated a new exhibit around that theme. The glamorous women in the artworks probably wouldn’t meet the standards of the runway, but each in her own way is the embodiment of a glamorous fantasy of one kind or another.
Most artists in the show are women. Some artworks are self-portraits, such as an elegant photograph by Cindy Sherman, a goofy silent film by Shannon Plumb and a provocatively tinted nude by intersex artist Juliana Huxtable. In others, the models are stand-ins for the artists depicting them. “Most artists don’t think about the models other than being models,” Rosenberg said.
Mickalene Thomas’ audience is African American women and she depicts her models in sexy, revealing clothes and sitting in living rooms with everyday decor and furnishings. “Who she uses as models is very important to her,” Rosenberg said. “She’s creating a made-up history, but with facts.”
Another black artist, Zanele Muholi, focuses on Africa’s LGBT community, and contributes a striking portrait of a beautiful woman with enormous eyes shot with yellow and red.
Matthew de Leon’s audience is the New York City LGBT community, where he received the Brooklyn Nightlife Award for Drag Queen of the Year in 2015. De Leon, a UConn grad, poses for photographer Diane Dwyer in two interpretations of himself: one a pink-haired, flower-dressed diva and the other bound by multicolored strips, his head crowned by a free-form tiara made with wire and beads.
Ryan Trecartin’s audience is teenagers, making his hour-long video, “Re: Search,” perfectly placed in the campus gallery. A dozen giggly, silly young women with unnaturally high-pitched voices wear fun but ridiculous get-ups, play around a house and a pool and make fools of themselves. The result is both annoying and adorable.
Another video, by Kate Cooper, is deceptively realistic on first sight, but on closer view, clearly computer generated. An athletic woman looks and moves in ways that imitate advertising imagery. Cooper employs what she calls “the language of hypercapitalism” to make her own mark on the marketing aesthetic.
Other artists in the show are Steve Gianakos and Jocelyn Hobbie.
“GLAMOUR” will be at UConn Contemporary Art Galleries, 830 Bolton Road in Storrs, until Dec. 9. contemporaryartgalleries.uconn.edu.
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