The Netherlands-based artist Bart Hess makes clothing, but not in the traditional sense. (He’ll craft something that’s made of slime, or a piece that lives solely on a digital platform.) It’s why, he explains in a video made by filmmaker Andrei Severny, Hess himself primarily uses video as his medium for showing his work.
“It’s not really fashion that I’m making,” he says in the Severny’s short, titled “Colliding Opposites.” “Though I get a lot of requests: ‘Can you send this-and-this outfit? Because I want to use it in a fashion shoot.’ Then I have to reply, ‘Yeah, but…[the clothing] only exists for one second.'”
Hess is featured in “Colliding Opposites” alongside the digital artist Tobias Gremmler, whose own feature is called “Digital Demons.” Together, the two are participating in a live theatrical experience called “Sleeping Beauty Dreams.” Hess will make the dancers’ costumes, and Gremmler is set to create the visuals for the performance, which will run Dec. 7 and 8 at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center, and Dec. 14 and 15 inside New York’s Beacon Theatre.
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Severny’s “Colliding Opposites” is part of a series called “Dreams of a Forgotten Future.” The videos chronicle the work of contemporary artists.
BART HESS. COLLIDING OPPOSITES from Synchronicity Films on Vimeo.
For his part, Hess — having worked with Lady Gaga and on installations featured at the Centre Georges Pompidou — says the human body is becoming a place where sensitive, interactive technology can thrive.
“The fascinating thing about it is the combination of skin and a material,” he says. “By using a material on the body that is not the body’s own, but making it look like it could possibly be, I create a tension between the body and material.”
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