Takashi Horisaki

Social Dress St. Louis: Learning and Unlearning, 2012
Latex, cheesecloth, acrylic paint, bamboo, wire, detritus from surface of objects
Dimensions variable, shown in 22 x 14 x 16 feet space
Installation view, Front Room, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Social Dress St. Louis: Learning and Unlearning moves beyond the ghosts of St. Louis’s urban planning history – the 1904 World’s Fair; the construction of Highways I-44, I-55 and I-64/40; and the Pruitt Igoe housing complex – to understand the history of the city in a nuanced way through the personal stories of its inhabitants. Seeking both the negative and positive aspects of this history, Horisaki lead a series of workshops around the city in which he, along with a team of student assistants, taught residents to create thin fabric-like latex casts of the surfaces of objects that have personal significance to them.

While helping participants replicate personal effects from trophies to coins, records to chinaware, and even brick or stone architecture, Horisaki and his team of teaching artists encouraged participants to tell the stories behind these objects. Based on the interactions Horisaki and his team had with various communities across St. Louis, the latex replicas made in these workshops were assembled into a sculptural collage in CAMSTL’s Front Room. A select number of residents’ stories were also recorded and incorporated into the sculptural collage via Augmented Reality, visible as a virtual layer of the piece when the installation was viewed through a smart phone or similar mobile device. Through this process, Social Dress St. Louis: Learning and Unlearning became a collaborative collage that included layers of personal and collective histories, as well as physical and virtual records, reexamining the shape of St. Louis’s history through its material culture.

Demonstration of Augmented Reality

Example Recorded Stories