Wearable Art Work
Vanessa Garcia
"I thought I wanted to be a principal in a Hebrew school," says mixed-media artist Renee Rey. She decided against it and went to Parsons, graduated with a degree in design and opened an interior design firm in Albany, NY. She then tossed that, got her MBA and took a bank job. All the while, she was painting, drawing and making things. Today, she dedicates herself fully to her art; particularly to the invention of a new medium, which she calls "Wearable Sculpture."
The wearable sculpture is as eclectic as Rey. Think music, movement, dance; pieces of instruments, allusions to film and silver, all taking the forms of cascading necklaces and thick cuff bracelets. After selling the pieces out of her own home and having great success, she has gained the interest of gallery owners and boutiques. ArtRouge Gallery in Miami, Florida and the Attitude Sobe-Tique on South Beach are now exhibiting and selling Rey’s wearable sculpture.
In her upcoming show at ArtRouge Gallery, Rey will not only be showing her wearable sculpture but the paintings that inspired them. The paintings themselves are of musicians; browns and blacks and grays imbued with dashes of implied dancers drawn in impressionist strokes of paint. In her wearable sculpture, Rey has taken pictures of these paintings, worked them with Photoshop, shrunk them, laminated them and bound them together with jewelry pieces like stones and thin chains. She also uses the keys of clarinets and saxophones. The result is something as multifaceted as the artist that creates them.
Rey comes from a multi-ethnic background. Her mother is French, Christian, and her father a Jewish New Yorker. Rey, however, was born in Japan because her father was an officer in the Navy. She doesn’t remember anything about Japan, though in confessing a personal love for sake she says, "I think my nanny, Midori, put sake in my bottle when I was a baby."
Rey, who is youthful and energetic, will not disclose her exact age, "vanity of vanities," say says. She’ll tell you instead, "I’ve been a professional artist for twelve years." She does not count the time before then, although she has always painted and drawn, because it is only recently that she has come to terms with herself as a professional artist. "When I was 18 months, I drew a fish and my mother called my father," she said, ‘Bernie, our daughter’s an artist, she’s drawing fish,’" says Rey with typical theatricality.
However, Rey ventured into other avenues of enterprise outside of fine art because "art just wasn’t something you did for a living." That is, until now, when her wearable sculpture is putting her on the map. Excited and surprised by her recent success, she says, "You just never know what’s going to catch."
On a weekday afternoon, she sits on her couch in her living room in South Beach talking about the film class she took while she was getting her MBA. Around her neck is one of her wearable sculptures entitled, Symphony. As she talks about her desire to someday venture into film, I can see this desire wrapped around her in her necklace: The small laminated squares look like film stills.
"You know, people used to be Renaissance people," says Rey. She identifies with the idea of multi-tasking. One look around her home, even before she starts talking, even before you see her eclectic body of work–which ranges from paintings about the Israeli peace process to Kentridge-like charcoals–you get the idea she might just be one of these Renaissance people.
All around her apartment are old Vitrolas, which she collects. "Music plays a big part in my work," she says, when she catches me staring at the turn of the century gramophone she’s got next to her painting of a saxophone player.
At the other end of her house, there’s a life-sized doll dressed with an apron: "That’s Lydia, my live-in maid," Rey laughs. "She comes from England. She worked for a butcher but rebelled. Yeah, she’s a rebel just like me."
Up above Lydia, up on top of a shelf, overlooking the whole scene, there’s another doll. The doll looks folksy, like someone made her on Gipetto-style table. She has hats on her head, her arms, hats everywhere. "That’s my hat maker," says Rey, "she’s like me too. You know. She wears many hats."
