Kate Zambreno

Last year Cat Chow asked one thousand people to each donate one dollar, out of which she constructed an expensive-looking evening gown. Although she has been designing what she terms sculptural garments out of everyday objects like baby-bottle nipples, buttons and bobbins since 1997, the resulting work, "Not for Sale," made the artist and her witty, provocative dresses all the fashion.

"You use money and all of a sudden everyone's all over you," marvels the fashion artist. "I hate money. It's a necessary evil, but how it triggers people is so interesting." The dollar-bill dress premiered at Art Chicago in May as a crisp cocktail sheath and was lengthened and finished for her one-woman show at the Chicago Cultural Center in September, where many were first exposed to her work. "'Not for Sale' is actually the first piece I ever saw," says Nathan Anderson, who co-owns the Jesus Chrysler Gallery in Pilsen, where Cat Chow will open another solo exhibition this week. "That turned me on to her. I thought, oh my God, what the fuck is it? It knocked me out. It's really amazing, the tailoring work she's done with this dress."

The hip artist with the feline-food name--her full name is Catherine--noir-clad and hair in pigtails, gives a tour of her Ukrainian Village apartment. Quaint shoes, vintage and handmade, hang on the wall, looking like the outer-space closet of the Wicked Witch of the West. A quick survey also reveals a Hello Kitty collection, various dress forms, an electric guitar that Chow plays in the punk band Plastic Crimewave, an old-fashioned Singer sewing machine on her worktable (her "little tank," she pats affectionately), and a thousand bucks worth of frock piled into a box.

"That's the one," she laughs. "Money, it's really durable." She fingers the intricate looping of the dress with its zigzagging features of the first president. Each bill was shred in twenty-five strips, then sewed and connected like chain mail, she explains. "I would come across one where George Washington's face was looking at me, and it was weird, like, I was doing something bad." Chow eventually plans a currency series using different denominations, but now she's more into zippers. She's made slinky zipper gowns before, one serpentine closure coiled head to toe, and now she's just started working on a skirt-of-the-month project, to be shown suspended on lampshade hoop frames. "I do like that taboo involved in looking up at it," she says. January and February--a monochrome curlicue and a candy-heart-colored mini--are also thrown on the floor.

Chow picks through a box, smoothing out earlier chain-mail swatches, surprising in their heaviness. While majoring in costume design at Northwestern University, she occasionally worked at a chain-mail shop in downtown Evanston, where she asked them to pay her in hardware. She demonstrates how she would open and close every ring with needle-nose pliers to make the seamless dresses that resembled Paco Rabanne's chain-mail creations before she even was exposed to the seventies designer. She'd sit on her couch and weave chain mail, listening to music. "It's like knitting, it's very meditative," Chow says of making her dresses. "I get excited when I see it grow and become a bigger fabric."

She eventually started to create her own fabric, starting small, plastic jewelry tags, o-rings, tape measures, wine corks, snaps, using the same connecting technique. She was recently commissioned to make a dress out of plastic gears. But a few years ago her work evolved from merely an aesthetic fascination with repetitive patterns to a more thematic approach. "I feel like now more than ever I have this audience so I'm really selective of the materials I choose," she agrees. Chow's designs are now more of a commentary on female identity and fashion itself, like a parka made out of tissues, a dress made out of telephone wire (last year's "Conversation Piece"), and a cell-phone dress commissioned by Nokia (entitled "Cell Out").

All of the designs double as sculpture and wearable garments, humorously skirting the high art and fashion worlds. "It's funny. Five years ago, I was doing this and people were like, 'You've got to choose whether you want to do fashion or art. You can't just like straddle the fence.' And I've just stuck to my guns. I like showing my work both in fashion shows and art shows, on models and in magazines," says Chow, paging through pictures from a fashion performance, where she wore her dress composed of little glass vials of water. "I'm not a clothing designer who's trying to make comfortable, easy-to-put-on clothes," she continues. "I have some dresses you can't sit down in. I'm just intrigued by the idea that this can be clothing."

What is remarkable in all of her fabrications is the amount of work apparent in them. She goes through the steps of making "Conversation Piece," where she first curled the colored wire around a pencil. "I get a kick out of extra steps," she says. There's an almost obsessive quality to her craftsmanship, which draws comparisons to Tom Friedman, the artist who painstakingly carved his portrait into an aspirin and sculpted a meteor out of toothpicks.

"Sometimes there will just be projects where I'm cursing the whole way because I'm just like 'this sucks, this sucks', you know, and then it'll be done, and it'll look nice. But I'm just struggling through the whole process of it." Today, Chow is finishing a dress for an upcoming opening in New York, to take place on her thirtieth birthday. For the show she's remaking her 1998 tape-measure dress, which she was never quite satisfied with. At first she wove the pastel-colored tape measures together on a larger wooden frame. Then she's sewing it all together from a fifties vintage pattern. As her minx cat Mustard wanders on the table, Chow shows how she first stitches the material, then opens up the seams, hammers it down, and then stitches it again. "See how thick it is now, I have to try to get it flat," she concentrates, hammering down the seam.

She talks as she works through the steady stream of bullets, her nimble fingers smoothing out the plastic material, her soft, almost singsong voice in melody with the metallic consistency of the Singer. Her dresses have been featured at a constant pace lately, both at alternative exhibition spaces like underground fashion shows and at museums. While in New York she'll be taking down another show, then five of her pieces will be featured at Jesus Chrysler through March. In April there will be a First Friday performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art and her kimono made of Power Ranger cards will be featured alongside Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol at a retrospective on the modern influence of comics at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Besides that, she teaches fashion design at both the School of the Art Institute and the International Academy of Art and Design and waits tables four times a week.

The fashion artist with the "punk-rock mentality" rarely sells her pieces. A profile in a local magazine highlighted her waiting-tables gig as a sign that she had not quite "made it." "I have this really strong opinion about people who do their artwork...I don't know, I don't see it as a business for me," she says, hammering out the seam. "I want to make these pieces, I'm not trying to create this sellable product. I do sell things every now and then and I think, oh, wow, bonus! I didn't expect it, you know?" Many have tried to convince her to sell her dollar-bill dress, sure to bring in a fortune.

"It's called 'Not for Sale,'" Chow points out.

(2003-03-12)

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