Art & Exhibitions
Artist Chloe Wise Remakes Chanel Bags Out of Bagels and Pancakes
A Chanel bagel bag with schmeer? Don't mind if we do.
Cait Munro
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If you’re into fashion but also appreciate carbohydrates, you’ll love Chloe Wise‘s “Pissing, Shmoozing, and Looking Away,” currently on display at Montreal’s Division Gallery.
The Canadian-born, New York-based artist’s first solo show riffs on the luxury handbag trade by recreating purses by Chanel, Coach, Louis Vuitton, and Prada using toast, bagels, challah, and croissants made from oil paint and urethane.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because back in October, the Internet exploded with curiosity after actress India Menuez carried Wise’s Chanel-inspired sculpture Bagel No. 5 to a film screening. Fashionistas demanded to know the origins of the cheeky piece (ironically, many assumed it was an authentic Chanel product—and scrambled to find a way to purchase the new It item), and Wise’s career took off overnight.
“I wanted to show the parallels between the idolatry for luxury items in fashion with the equivalent importance of the commodity in the art world. In a similar way, sculptures/artworks are valuable status items, and both designer goods and sculptural pieces can be seen as pieces of cultural capital,” she told Bullett after the bagel bag rose to mass consciousness.
In addition to the Internet-breaking pseudo-handbags, the show also includes carb-crafted fetish pieces, like the Matzochism Paddle, a paddle made of, you guessed it, matzo.
“Wise conflates so-called “guilty” commercial, gastronomical, and sexual pleasures—it bags, carb-rich breakfast foods, and fetish gear— creating imagined hybrids of frivolity and excess,” reads a press release from the gallery.
The show’s title is derived from Mary Gaitskill’s novel Two Girls: Fat and Thin, which explores the complex and deeply interwoven relationships many women have with food and sex.
Wise was also featured in the 2014 Last Brucennial—the owner of the building it was held in even purchased one of her sculptures, a Star of David made out of bacon (see The Final Brucennial Opens With Beer, Bacon, and Bullish Performance Art).
Chloe Wise, “Pissing, Shmoozing, and Looking Away” is on display at Division Gallery from March 26—May 2, 2015.
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