Signature Style

Overview

Signature Style, the title of Craft Victoria's latest exhibition that shares the space with Caroline Phillips' Enmeshed, refers to an elusive and attractive concept creative folk have been consciously trying to achieve since loincloths were en Vogue. It’s about finding that one quality the narcissist within us all hopes we will be forever remembered for. As I am writing this in the peak of Melbourne’s heatwave, one could be forgiven for assuming my signature style is a sweat moustache and clammy hands — unintentional, but sometimes beauty is that way.

Sweat pools aside, the creative practice behind developing an identifiable signature style is often a very insular, independent experience. Signature Style eschews the idea of individual artistic creativity, exploring models of collaborative practise in contemporary jewellery.

Occupying half of the bright, light-filled Craft Victoria space, the exhibition brings together some of Melbourne’s most innovative emerging creatives, resulting in a widely varied collection of work, using equally unusual mediums. After all, everybody knows you can’t have a contemporary jewellery show without some human hair and teeth involved, right?

Particularly striking is Cosmic Elevator, an installation piece by Karla Way and Dylan Martorell. An ambiguous form lies in an ornate tiki-esque structure, decorated by flowers and heavily adorned in colourful beads and found objects, as though an offering to tropical gods.

Elsewhere artist Natalia Milosz-Piekarksa and contemporary dancer Katherine Doube have created a minimal and refined video work. Dance and movement inform the film, which features a wearable shoulder piece that clings like barnacles and moves with the dancing model like a lurking, deep-sea creature.

Flexing the muscles of Gen Y, an iPad showing footage of attractive hoodlums recklessly putting Mentos into their soft drinks and proceeding to dribble all down their nice, clean clothes while wearing various pieces of jewellery accompanies a display of pieces by Dan Bell et al.

Nearby cosmic rocks hang from a frame of knotted ropes and brightly beaded chains that seem to scream, “I am fun and flirty but don’t touch me for I am also art” — or something along those lines.

Image via Craft Victoria.