PuSh Festival 2024: Returns

Tickets

Cost: Free

NELLIE GOSSEN (UNCEDED COAST SALISH TERRITORIES)

Note: This installation is open to the public from Jan 7–Feb 3. Visitors are free to come and go during the installation’s opening hours.

An imaginative convergence of dance, labour and garment fabrication, Returns is an innovative experiment and month-long artistic enquiry into the standard 30-day retail return policy.

Moved to unearth the materials and performances already at play within consumer capitalism, interdisciplinary artist Nellie Gossen disassembles retail clothing to create an ever-shifting sculptural installation. Each performance recombines material, choreography and action, unfurling new iterations of meaning.

On the final day, the clothes are meticulously reconstructed and returned to the store for a full refund, imperceptibly reintroducing the artist’s time, labour and artistic intervention into the machine of fast fashion. The traditional garment workers’ skillset is repurposed into a practice of social impact.

Returns is a fascinating, inherently political work, offering a new way of engaging with exploitative systems.

Artist Bio:
Nellie Gossen (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. Working through the media of fashion, costume, textiles and performance, Nellie uses clothing as a tool to think and feel through social systems.

With an interest in repurposing the materials, rhythms and choreographies of the mainstream fashion industry, Nellie practices fashion as a space of study, ceremony, and as a critical site of research into embodied experiences of consumer capitalism. Drawing on formal training in both Fashion Design and Religious Studies, Nellie is particularly interested in the space that is created when clothing and contemplative practices meet.

Nellie’s work has been presented throughout Canada and Germany. As a costume designer and textile collaborator, Nellie has worked with artists such as Nancy Tam, Steven Hill, Francesca Frewer, Erika Mitsuhashi, Alexa Mardon and Michaela Gerussi.

Alongside her artistic inquiries, Nellie studies and practices end of life spiritual care.

Showtimes
February 1: 5-8pm
February 2: 5-8pm
February 3: 5-8pm
Visitors are free to come and go during the installation’s opening hours.
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