HIERARCHY SWEATERS

This project started while writing my dissertation and drawing my dreams.  A few years after the bride project, I began documenting my own dream material as an extension of exploring my inner landscape. Similar to the vision of the bride, I found that my dreams included archetypal structures that we encounter in the oldest of narratives. I found myself drawing these ideas and settled upon 4 sources of power: the image of a female dressed in the garments of a priest, noble, and judge, contrasting a single nude. These costumes illustrated the complexity of inhabiting these spaces. It is often the case that the roles represented by these structures have treated the female form as an object of desire, consumption, control, judgement, and punishment. I ran with this idea and worked with Stitching Borders knitting collective--to create these garments and wear them at the 2017 Women’s March of Los Angeles. After that I experimented with wearing the sweaters in public. Later, women that I knew personally expressed interest in wearing the sweaters out of curiosity, similar to an inquiry or investigation.Photographers, Elizabeth Beristain and Lourdes Valdés later documented the walks.