We discuss pivots from web development to photography to exploring generative AI. I also share details about current projects like my MÖTLEYKRÜG podcast, inspirations, and goals for the future.
I’m pleased to share my recent interview with longtime friend and fellow creative Marilyn Wilson. Marilyn runs the fashion and lifestyle blog Olio By Marilyn based in Vancouver. After spending time on Hornby Island during the pandemic, I recently moved back to the city and have been immersing myself in Vancouver’s dynamic arts community.
Marilyn was quick to welcome me back and connected us for…
Louis is wearing a Ksubi Pixel Kash Tee in Jet Black on stage in Vancouver.
Designed with a reverse overlocked side seam detail and signature rats tail, this short sleeved shirt is a regular fit style with a crew neck. The shirt features a heat transfered printed artwork on the front and back and finished with the signature Ksubi branding.
The genus Yucca (49 species and 24 subspecies) is native to hot and dry areas of the Americas but they grow quite well in Vancouver. Most Yuccas have long, skirt-like petals that hang straight down and demurely hide the plants stamens and pistil. However this particular Yucca has decided to make a bold fashion statement and it doesn’t seem to care who’s looking at its reproductive parts.
Contributions by: Himikalas Pamela Baker; Julian Bleecker; Lucie Chan and Zoë Chan; Clinton Cuddington; Hélène Day Fraser and Keith Doyle; Amber-Dawn Bear Robe; Siobhan McCracken Nixon; Stephanie Rebick; Andrea Valentine-Lewis; and others
Vancouver Art Gallery, 2023, 184 pages, 200 ill.,24x32cm, ISBN 97811988860176
Fashion Fictions surveys experimental design practices that exist at the intersection of fashion and other modes of cultural production. International in scope, the exhibition explores the increasing influence of research-based, materially driven practices on the global fashion scene, while acknowledging the proliferation of creative practices that challenge the aesthetic, material and technological conventions of fashion. The title of the exhibition is drawn from artist and technologist Julian Bleecker’s influential essay “Design Fiction” (2009) in which he extends the term first coined by critic and theorist Bruce Sterling to argue that the most innovative, transformative work is produced in the spaces between fact and fiction, the present and the near future, and the scientific and the fantastical. All of the designers in Fashion Fictions occupy these liminal spaces, using fashion as a means to unite seemingly disparate sentiments and to propose new possibilities for aesthetics, bodily forms and, more ambitiously, how we exist in the world. Drawing on various cultural traditions, science fiction, technology, and an interest in the natural world and sustainability, designers invent fashion objects that act as visual manifestations of new realities and celebrations of hybrid identities. Rather than presenting retrofuturist visions that recycle the space age imagery of the 1960s and 70s, these designers are proposing new trajectories and new possibilities for the near future. The exhibition is comprised of three thematic sections: Material Futures, which includes work that features technological and scientific innovations in materials research; Aesthetic Prophesies, which highlights designers’ fusion of cultural traditions with speculative creations; and Responsible Visions, which investigates how designers are incorporating adaptive reuse and upcycling into their explorations.