Reconciling identity through artistic practice: Reframing the object as the 'empty dress'

This study explores the art historical journey of clothing as it appears in figurative painting, sculpture, and installation art. It investigates the artist's rendering of dress as a potent visual phenomenon in the human world contributing greatly to the way human life looks and, even further, unfolds.; The research examines the transition of dress in contemporary art as a departure from traditional clothing as an accoutrement for the body and represented as clothing abstracted from the body in order to investigate issues of identity. Reconciling identity through artistic practice, the empty dress in artistic form and content serves as an investigation of the tension among self, body, and identity.; The method of inquiry best suited for this study draws upon the framework of David Kingery and Jules David Prown, whose theories on material culture help us understand both the subject matter of the study---material---and its purpose---the understanding of culture.; The research is contextual as a case study method. I examine the lives and work of contemporary artists Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith in order to intensify selective issues at hand, namely the tension among body, self, and identity as reflected in dress as material culture.; By adopting the dialectical nature of body/self, it is possible to examine the unity of the body and the self and to explore how they constitute each other. It is argued that dress in everyday life is always more than a shell; it is an intimate aspect of the experience and presentation of the self and is so closely linked to the identity that dress, the body, and the self are not perceived separately but simultaneously, as a totality.; Reframing the object as the empty dress represents an art form and a form of life at the point of which the object's material existence symbolizes both objective and subjective change and thus the contradictory nature of material objects. This dichotomy suggests an endless vocabulary of formal oppositions whereas cloth becomes the medium, the material, the aesthetic, and the substance of much contemporary art.