ABSENCE ADORNED
"LaMonte’s pieces, whatever their weight, proclaim beauty and evanescence, fragility and delicacy, transparency and light, luxury and magic. Her decision to make the dress her central motif led to the kind of dress she chose for transubstantiation into glass, where the fragility of the glass augments the fineness and translucency of the fabric, and the lightness expressed by ornamentation of the garment—flounces, bows, ribbons, ruffles. At least initially, the dresses she chose were declarations of radical femininity on the part of their wearers— garments so constructed as to project an image of ideal grace."
- Arthur C. Danto
"In her ‘clothed sculptures,’ LaMonte combines both past and present. Tradition features in the portrayal of figures through drapery. In classical Greek antiquity the female body was not depicted nude but in a peplos. In the Gothic era, drapery endowed the sculpture with expressiveness, for instance noble elegance or spiritual ecstasy. LaMonte often perceives drapery in a Baroque way, as a theatrical expression of wealth and vanity. The dresses themselves can be an artifact, in an artistic or a cult sense, whether this means the veil of the Virgin Mary at Chartres, Marilyn Monroe’s dress or ultimately old, anonymous dresses transformed into a kind of glass relic."
- Petr Štěpán
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I use dresses and drapery to sculpt the body in absentia. The disembodied figure is important, because it evokes mortality, tempering the undeniable pleasures of beauty with the melancholy reality of its transience.
- Karen LaMonte