Carnegie Mellon’s student gallery The Frame is back with “The Clothes Make the Man,” a solo show of BXA senior Lillian van Veen’s latest exciting multi-media work.
The show was on March 20–22, so unfortunately those who missed it will just have to enjoy it through my words and the pictures here. But don’t be down; take this moment as a great calling to see the next Frame show! There’s one every weekend and the gallery is a two-minute walk from campus. You can see what’s next at @theframegallerycmu on Instagram or what was happening circa 2022 when they stopped posting on Facebook if you’re some sort of oddball archivist.
Now back to van Veen. In their own words, “‘The Clothes Make the Man’ explores the relationship between queer bodies and the clothes they wear … transforming defunct garments into unwearable art objects.” This took multiple forms, from shirts merging into canvases to video screens draped in Girl Scout wear.
I sat down with van Veen in their Loge studio (the top floor of CFA, for all of you who didn’t know the CFA roof is a big skylight over several dozens of art studios) to talk all about their work and the show I had just seen a few days prior. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation:
Sam Bates: Right off the bat, I want to start by talking about your process. Throughout your work, I kept noticing that I’d look at a painting, and it would take me time to figure out where the clothing was stopping and where the painting was starting. How did you develop the idea to use clothing, and then how did you decide to merge that with other practices to examine identity? Is that a new idea or something more gradual for you?
Lillian van Veen: I would say I started as a painter. I was in high school as a painter and, as I began experimenting more with how I was presenting and style and stuff, I realized that I was sewing a lot of my own clothes. I also had a large number of clothes that I had worn when I was presenting femininely that essentially were defunct, and I wasn’t using them in any capacity. I noticed that sewing and working with textiles was popping up more and more in my work, but the idea to blend it with painting came from an urge to experiment with garments in a way that left them unwearable. By making it unwearable, it was essentially a way for me to say, okay, what are the artistic, material, or symbolic elements of these garments without having to wear them personally?
SB: That’s a very interesting approach, and it never feels like the clothes are fighting the painting. Everything is kind of harmonious in a cool way, which I find very admirable.
LV: I will say I did grow up sewing a bit. My mom taught me to sew when I was young. She’s a quilter. I think the benefit of painting is that, even though you’re putting something on the surface of a canvas, ultimately it is a textile, so there is a lot of material overlap there that makes it feel not crazy that I’m jumping into these textiles.
- SB: That brings me to another question here. When it comes to a work like this, do you find an article of clothing and say, “Okay, I want to build a painting around this,” or do you start sketching someone in jeans and say, “Okay, what if I started cutting up denim for this?”
LV: Normally, when I’m doing a piece, I do have the piece of clothing in mind. But I will say that oftentimes, even though I know the clothing I’m working with, I don’t always know the image that I’m going to be working with. That’s where the experimentation comes in, and that’s where I can be surprised sometimes.
SB: Building off of that, how do you know when to alter clothing or not? It’s almost like an abstraction versus figuration kind of thing.
LV: I honestly don’t know if I have a great answer for that. Last semester, I was making a lot of smaller pieces where I was approaching the same interest and idea, figuring out how to combine clothing and painting in a way that felt interesting to me. And I did that in a bunch of smaller ways, so they can be quite different from one another. It’s hard to say, “I just made it!”
SB: It’s far from an exact science! How do you know when to paint versus when to, say, sculpt? Or when to install or when to film?
LV: I’m BXA, so most of my course load in the arts has been lighter than people pursuing their BFA. This semester, I’m taking my first sculpture course, which is in soft sculpture. And I think, throughout my independent studies, I’ve had a lot of ideas that do jump out of the realm of painting, and I just haven’t had the space or the time to be able to make those. So, that class has been amazing for me. I’ve gotten the opportunity to take ideas that I’ve been thinking about since last semester and make them! When I’m moving into video, it has to do with wearable objects. A lot of this stuff comes from the same place, but I want to find a range of ways to express it.
SB: I thought it was neat how two kinds of titling conventions were bouncing off of each other. You’ve got some almost blunt and highly literal ones, like “Yellow Jewelry” or “Fishnet Gym Socks,” which are very much about the clothes. But you’ve also got some that are focused more on the people behind the clothes, like “My Forever Sunburn” or “Quilt of the Nicest Shirt I own over Three Tracings of my Mother’s Wedding Dress.” I also commend you on being able to cut up the nicest shirt you own.
LV: It wasn’t on purpose! I was trying to crop it and went one button too high. So I accidentally destroyed it and figured I might as well salvage it. In terms of titles, I don’t think anyone’s ever pointed that out before. I think most of them come pretty naturally. Sometimes it’s hard but by the time a painting is finished, the title just shows up.
SB: It seems like denim has a special place in your heart. I was wondering if it does, because it has a special place in mine and because it is so iconic. It’s associated with so many things. It’s cowboy clothing, but it can also be like Megan Fox’s model clothing.
LV: I certainly think denim is a major part of Americana. I’m also inspired by how it’s quite utilitarian. I’m interested in taking that utilitarian aspect and playing with that. I think this lines up with the short film that I included, where I asked my interviewee, who is butch, about their favorite piece of clothing. They said that it was their pair of jeans because it’s so hard to find jeans that fit, especially if you’re hyper-aware of the fact that the clothes you wear are not designed to fit your body.
SB: Inspiration-wise, a lot of your work seems to come from a very internal source. But when it does come from other places, where do you find it? Where are some of the unexpected places that you pull inspiration from?
LV: I love the world of costuming from the world of theater! I love cabarets and stuff with huge feathers and lots of beads and garments that are very handmade. I like to look at them even if I think they’re not something I would personally wear.
SB: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
LV: Come see more of my work this spring at the Tomayko Foundation in the larger senior thesis exhibition, and you can find more of my work on my Instagram (@lillianartt)! Hopefully, you’ll see it in future venues!
