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"I can hear you!" said Kayleigh Nelson, one of the artists selected for the Ace Hotel's Content 2015 show this weekend.
I'm on the phone with Nelson, lost on my way to her Composition gallery on NW Everett Street.
She opens the door with a huge smile to an art gallery in transition. It's an inconspicuous niche with an outdated website but big plans for the future. Composition is shifting from an art site to a boutique, which Nelson says she plans to open on Saturdays in the near future.
To the left, a square wooden bench soaks up natural light and to the right, a stark table sits under a single lightbulb hanging from the high ceiling. The racks for clothing aren't screwed into the walls yet, but all the pieces are there and ready. Behind Nelson, the fluorescent lights of her sewing studio flicker a little.
This weekend, Nelson will present her new line, Human Noise, at The Ace Hotel's annual Content art/fashion pop-up show. She was inspired by the roles of women in sci-fi movies, she said. Whether heroine or damsel, powerful or submissive, Nelson examines how male-dominated film writing, direction and consumption affects the (often skimpy) costumes that female sci-fi characters wear. Her favorite example: Princess Leia in a Star Wars Ep VI scene where the heroine is chained by the neck to Jabba the Hut and wears an iron bikini. Eventually, the princess kills her captor.
Fetishwear is an obvious influence—a brown leather harness hangs in her studio— as Nelson analyzes culture through fashion.
"How we present ourselves can change day-to-day depending on what we choose to wear," said Nelson. "It can encourage different parts of ourselves that wouldn't normally be waking up."
"It's a very strong message without having to speak," she said.
Nelson's usual clients are artists, dancers or drag performers, and she recently debuted her own "fearless" persona FAUN Dae at Critical Mascara. But the artist's boundary-pushing style is rooted in her educational background in Business, English and Fine Art. For her Bachelor's thesis, called Costumes for Evacuation, she picked four emotions (jealousy, anger, anxiety and sadness) and created garments that supposedly inspired those emotions when you put them on and shed those emotions when you took them off. The clothes for anxiety were constricting; anger's were hard to get in and out of. She called it "exposure therapy."
Showing at Content was less planned. Nelson had never seen the exhibit when four friends encouraged her to apply (this is the first year the Ace required an application). Her good friend got an acceptance letter, but Nelson heard nothing. A week later, event organizers asked Nelson to come in to explain her concept—they didn't get it but couldn't forget it. A meeting later, Nelson was accepted. Now she's excited for the challenge of turning a guest room on the Ace's second floor (furniture and all) into an immersive Human Noise installation.
"I think it's going to be quite a reach. A lot of people are going to be seeing what I've been doing, and they have no idea what this world is that I've been in or making," she said. But the unexpected is part of her process: "I want to keep pushing myself in ways that make me feel uncomfortable." CAROLINE LAI.
GO: Content is at The Ace Hotel, 1022 Stark St., 7 pm Saturday, Nov. 14. $20.
Willamette Week