On Friday, May 3, from 5:30 to 8:00 p.m., the Jonathan Frost Gallery in Rockland will host the opening reception for the show “Lesia Sochor and Nan Haid: Clothing, Fashion, and Badges of the Human Heart.” Steve Lindsay will play live jazz piano.
Sochor will be showing oil paintings of dresses and other garments, filled out and moving with the human form, painted on collaged sewing pattern paper. She’ll also show paintings of zippers and spools of thread. The incident that sparked this ongoing body of work was coming across her deceased mother-in-law’s collection of spools of thread. “It just flooded me with memories of my mother, who was an amazing seamstress.”
“I don’t think of fashion being superficial,” she says. “Creating a persona is not superficial. Reinventing yourself, presenting an image to the world, can be incredibly powerful.” She isn’t uncritically admiring of the fashion industry, though. One painting shows a female mannequin and, superimposed, the names of countries where masses of underpaid women work in unsafe conditions to produce clothes for big-name labels. Another painting asks, “Who Puts Your Zipper In?”
Nan Haid will be showing selections from her “Nanoseconds” series of visual diaries. “Nanoseconds 2: Life Jacket” and “Nanosecond 8: Hung Up and Stuck,” use the form and metaphor of an article of clothing. In “Life Jacket,” the jacket shape serves as the ground onto which square, badge-like emblems of each passing day are affixed. “Hung Up and Stuck” is an outfit of pants and jacket of a thick, relatively dark material suspended on a hanger. Sewn to it, front and back, in crazy quilt fashion, are very dark collage pieces representing two difficult years. The outfit also hosts a painful quantity of safety pins, stuck into the angular shapes at regular intervals.
A third “Nanoseconds” piece, “Six Angels for the New Millenium: Love Faith, Hope Charity, Joy, Peace,” presents both the mundane and the deeply emotional components of the artist’s life as a progression or procession of emblems.
The Jonathan Frost Gallery is located at the corner of Main Street and Park Drive in Rockland; the entrance is on Park Drive. The show will be up through June 29. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 to 5:00. The phone number is (207) 596-0800.