The Girl in the Wood Frock #148 is a photo image derived from the exhibition with the same name currently on view at G+ GALLERIES (thru July 15, 2007). It is an exhibition by emerging artist Andrea Ling, guest curated by Gary Michael Dault.
A girl, forced to marry her father after he sees her playing in his dead wife’s wedding gown, runs away wearing 5 dresses. 4 dresses are of silk and they are beautiful. The last dress is of wood. It is in this dress that the girl escapes, throwing herself into the river to float away. A prince saves the girl, but treats her badly, for she wears an ugly wood frock. Her suffering is eased at night when the girl takes off the wood dress and dances in the silk ones. The prince discovers the girl in the silk dress and they live happily ever after.
"The Girl in the Wood Frock" is based on a fairy-tale in which a girl’s life is changed by what she wears. The heroine experiences the outside world through her clothes, in particular, her dress made of wood. It becomes her first architecture, protecting and sheltering the girl in the most intimate fashion while at the same time highlighting her physicality and extending its influence. In this in-between place, elusively defined by the shifting dialogue between her moving body and the surface of the wood shell surrounding her, is a most potent, and poetic, form of space.
Andrea Ling completed her Masters in Architecture at the University of Waterloo in 2007, with a background in physiology at the University of Alberta. This exhibit showcases her graduate thesis work in which she explores her fascination with clothes and how they affect bodily experience, both in the making and wearing of them. Andrea Ling currently splits her time between Cambridge and Toronto.
