Double Adapter is a group exhibition focusing on wearable sculpture at MARS Gallery, curated by Louise Meuwissen, presenting the works of artists Isabel Avendano-Hazbun, Xanthe Dobbie, and John Gosper.

 

Avendano Hazbun, Dobbie, and Gosper work with discarded technology and the overflow of virtual e-waste – data, images and information that circulates online – to create works that question how modern technologies shape and inform our individual and collective identity, ways of being, and how this may physically manifest through dress.

 

Double Adapter examines the relationship between the creation of desire for new products, inbuilt obsolescence in technology and fashion, and an increasing awareness, value-signaling and branding around ethical design and sustainability.

 

 

Xanthe Dobbie is a new media artist and filmmaker. Working across on- and offline modes of making, their practice aims to capture the experience of post-internet contemporaneity as reflected through queer and feminist ideologies. Drawing on humour, pop, sex, history and iconography, Xanthe develops shrines to a post-truth era.

 

Through their practice John Gosper seeks to generate ways in which art and fashion can destabilise the centrality or neutrality of particular embodiments and identities within image-making. These identities include whiteness, thinness, hetero-normative lifestyles. As an artist that claims oppositional identities, Gosper explores image-making and sculpture-making which confront these neutralities.

 

Isabel Avendano Hazbun is a Colombian-born artist with formal training in furniture and textile design – the intersection of which form the premise of her practice. Her work proposes dress and adornment as a platform to discuss gender politics, and as a tool to rearrange the value of physical and social spaces.  

 

 

Louise Meuwissen’s practice examines dress as an expressive semantic device and social barometer. Her work explores the tensions between fashion, luxury, consumption, desire and fantasy-production. She is interested in the complex relationship between illusion and power, and the ways we value-signal through our consumer and aesthetic choices.  

 

 

 

This event is part of Melbourne Design Week and is an initiative of the Victorian Government in collaboration with the NGV