GO FIGURE - Rainen Knecht Collaboration

We are delighted to announce GO FIGURE pop-up collaboration between G&G and artist Rainen Knecht. For this series Rainen appliquéd our clothing with printed fabrics from our archives.

Rainen’s interest in fashion prompted these experiments and they serve as an outsider’s effort to move into that foreign world. Making these was an exercise in play, a task that for Rainen didn’t have the weight of “art” but could still have some originality and humor.

The work here is about the primordial relationship between bodies and faces and during her process Rainen was thinking about surrealist fashion, specifically Elsa Schiaparelli, about the stupidity of “good taste.”

We commission our mutual friend Sarah Enid Hagey to document Rainen’s work.

Sarah says: “The photoshoot was inspired by Rainen’s attention to the expressiveness of two dimensional faces, bodies, and forms. Drawing from my friendship with Rainen, I was inspired by female comic duos and their interplay of action and reaction, emotion and physical humor. The set and styling was influenced by the graphic qualities and illustrations of 1930's Vogue covers in combination with the flattened space of comic book panels and the female characters that inhabit the funny pages.” 

“To me, beauty is looks you can never forget. A face should jolt, not soothe.” - John Waters

“I am for messy vitality over obvious unity”  - Robert Venturi/Denise Scott Brown

Born in Gig Harbor, WA in 1982 Rainen Knecht lives and works in Portland. She graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006. She received the Madjrakoff Painting award as an undergraduate. Previously, Knecht has exhibited her work at Capital, San Francisco, Either Way, Los Angeles, Adobe Books, San Francisco, Baer Ridgeway, San Francisco.