Dear Shaded Viewers,
Stux Gallery in NYC is exhibiting the work of New York based Nigeria -born artist, Ike Ude. Thomas Carlyle describes the dandy as "a clothes-wearing man, a man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of clothes wisely and well."
According to Ike, "Dandyism is also the significance of sartorial distinction enhanced by indeterminate delicacy of pose, gestures, tilt, determinate lines, or a thrust here-and-there, all harmonized by an agreeable countenance."
Amy Fine Collins
Complementing Ike Ude's Self Portraits are portraits of celebrities in their own right. Through Ike's vision of self, these works continue in the tradition of portrait painting reaching back hundreds of years. According to Ude, "to quote from all items of past or present men's attire is the aim of sartorial anarchy. By mixing varied costumes in concert with the now and then, we begin to ralize how arbitrary, subjective, fleeting, even absurdor "real" cultural construct is. Sartorial Anarchy demonstrates a debt to artifice while acknowledging an ongoing back-and-forth between culturally subjective ambiguities in men's dresscodes and its attendant beauty, flaws and contradictions."
Later,
Diane
