'XIII: New Utility (got violence?)' by Louis Backhouse at RTA HQ
 

19.6.25-6.7.25

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Utility—the state of being useful, profitable, or beneficial—is shown here through eight pieces of adaptive clothing, photographed on two models. A collection of tops and dresses fitted with arm slings demonstrate high performance wearable utility. The casting centres bodies that are often excluded from mainstream narratives of usefulness, or the vilified feminine. Then visual style akin to catalogue imagery, stock photos, and educational textbook depictions of “The Public”—echoes governmental sanitized attempts at inclusivity. Here, dresses are adapted to bodies with acquired disability; they provide utility to bodies presumed to have lost theirs, and in turn augment that loss. A collection of useful clothing for apparently useless bodies, and dresses for broken limbs.*

 

‘To invoke something’s utility is often to eschew political, aesthetic, sensuous, sentimental, or traditional values. For many, these values are vital to the human experience. Utility is thus often seen as a bloodless consideration. But utility has a utopian side too. Considerations of utility cut across our expectations and allow us to see differently. The utility of the pictured garments flows from the broken bodies they clothe. They are consequently adapted to those bodies. But the clothes also make the bodies present to us, physically and functionally, in a different way that undercuts anodyne appeals to inclusivity, for instance, or the dichotomy between ability and disability.’ - Joseph Backhouse-Barber​

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*(text courtesy of the artist.)

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