T-shirts On The Margins: Extra Small, Small, Medium, Media
Presented by Sang Thai
DETAILS
Free, no booking required
Coates Community Arts
20 Collins Street, Melbourne VIC, Australia
DATES
Fri 16 May 11am – 5pm
Sat 17 May 11am – 4pm
This exhibition explores the potential for the t-shirt to communicate and embody marginal experiences as a medium.
T-shirts hold a significant place in fashion. Although they are derided as examples of the excess of fast fashion, or even the end-of-fashion, their ubiquity and relative speed of production have also made them useful actants in political protest movements, and have helped build communities for the socially marginalised. T-shirts On The Margins is an interactive creative work that explores this through the opportunity to participate in the alteration of existing t-shirts to suit your own diverse body. For this, you will be able to choose from a selection of (limited) t-shirts that will be available, or you are welcome to bring your own to alter.
Participants
Sang Thai
Sang Thai is undertaking a PhD at RMIT University;s School of Fashion and Textiles investigating masculinity, intersectionality, and inclusive fashion design practices for social change. The PhD explores the intersection of diasporic Asian and queer identities to inform a fashion practice that interrogates the t-shirt archetype. Straddling multiple worlds of practices and meanings, this work engages with the complications of the numerous marginal conditions growing up as a migrant in Australia, as well as being queer to bring together the semiotic and agential potential of fashion materials to express the entanglement of race and sexuality in the lived experience.