CURA.

In 2015 I stumbled across images of ecstatic figures dancing in the rain across New York City streets, draped in fabrics and jewelry unlike anything I had ever seen. It appeared as a secret and ancient women’s healing ritual. It was Women’s History Museum’s mesmerizing first collection, which I interviewed them about at the time. I have been lucky to know them as friends and watch their project grow, evolve and thrive since then. For CURA., we reflected together on what has changed and what has not, and spoke about shopping, dolls, and friendship.

Ada
In your performances and gallery shows, you often stage situations that evoke the performance of self. I was recently looking into the history of the mirror, and most people could only see themselves in water or small bits of polished metal until the 12th century.

Amanda
What’s fascinating is that even when people couldn’t see themselves, they were still invested in how they dressed and looked. When I am walking around, I am not looking at myself the whole day, but I am aware of being perceived by others. My own interest in clothing started as a young person with a desire for self-protection out of a feeling of fragility. It wasn’t physical protection, but there’s psychological security and freedom that comes with feeling safeguarded by what you are wearing.

Mattie
There were times in the past when the sense of beauty was untainted by what it’s tainted by now. There was still hierarchy embedded in the notion of beauty, but it was connected to other things, like the sacred and the spiritual.

Ada
I also started caring about clothes not to see myself but to hide. After puberty, I started wearing only baggy clothes. In the summer I would wear this enormous windbreaker. Teachers would ask, “Aren’t you hot?” and I would say “Not at all” even though I was sweltering. It was amazing, being able to hide in the windbreaker.

Amanda
I did that in middle school too and I had people say the same thing! The moment of realization that your body is being perceived is disturbing. Luckily we had fashion.

Ada
Do you think the way you showcase the beauty of imperfect things evokes the archetype of the damaged or “used” woman who, like used clothing, is deemed discardable and forgettable?

Mattie
These are archetypes and tropes that fascinate me artistically and on a personal level, from living life in what is considered a female encasement. There is a metaphysical mystery to vintage or used clothing. There is this palpable enigma about its previous owners and what history it is enmeshed with. You’re holding something that’s 150 years old. It’s something that somebody once loved and lost and that expresses some transient part of their psyche. There is something humble about clothing, because it’s not attempting to be permanent, it’s meant to be worn on the body. When you take the clothes off a body and see them in a pile on the floor, their power is diminished yet they hold so much fascination.

Amanda
I think that to be a woman is often to feel damaged or broken, and like there is something wrong with you in some capacity. To me, there is more depth to imperfection, it can be mesmerizing. Objects being damaged aesthetically makes them attractive. I am drawn to this imperfect human quality in the things that I like. Collisions between different unfinished fragments, whether material or textual, are the starting point for a lot of our pieces.

Ada
I wanted to ask you about female friendship, since you are collaborators but also best friends—how does it work for you?

Amanda
So much pressure exists around finding one’s romantic soulmate who is meant to complete you in all these ways. But my friendships are in some ways more fulfilling, more dimensional and complex.

Ada
Friendships usually last longer and see you through more, maybe because they are not tethered to the sexual, although there may be a sexual charge to the intensity of the connection.

Amanda
Not many best friends work together as closely as we do. The experience is very rewarding, but also very difficult. We have grown a lot. We started collaborating in our 20s. At that age, you don’t know anything about boundaries [laughs]. On paper, our personalities seem like they wouldn’t get along well together. Mattie is always honest and can be confrontational, while I can be more avoidant. But it’s perfect for addressing the problems that arise when doing the projects we do.

Mattie
I haven’t heard of many fashion duos that are two female best friends, as we are. We also have many collaborators. The way we work can be like a collaging process.

Amanda
Having fashion as part of the medium and subject matter of the art that we make is a deterrent for people to take it seriously. It’s feminine, and people dismiss it as less intellectual, even though that’s not true. It confuses people, this gray area we inhabit.

Mattie
There are talented artists who are making money, but you are encouraged to stick to a formula, or your work isn’t marketable. Viewers need to be able to recognize it and digest it quickly.

Ada
There is a perspectival ambiguity to your work. You celebrate tropes or stereotypes while also critiquing them, embracing different perspectives simultaneously, which can be disorienting. How does it feel for you to work from that place of ambiguity?

Mattie
While we are both addicted to fashion, we are also repulsed by a lot of the industry. We’ve noticed the press placing what we are doing into a simplified idea of feminism that is about “Girl boss representation.” But the truth is we are also inspired by things that are fucked up, contradictory, or misogynistic. We try to reflect the surreal state of being female, which can sometimes feel like hysteria.

Amanda
We are both participants in consumerism, in this questionable collective lust for fashion. Now that we have a physical store where we sell and buy clothes, we are even more directly involved in commerce. This has created a very specific position that we’ve been exploring in our recent work. We are trying to understand our own compulsions and drives, asking ourselves what is making us do these things and wondering why we are fulfilled by them.
I have always been able to spend hours shopping online, since I was 10 years old. It feels like dreaming. I’m exploring fantasy worlds in this disembodied imaginary headspace. Whereas if I’m shopping in person, I can feel self-conscious. We are both collectors of fashion and objects—we will hunt through endless amounts of fabric and be blown away by a tiny scrap. Collisions between different fragments, whether material or textual, are the starting point.

Mattie
This relates to what we were talking about, the search to find beauty in flaws. Our boutique is about fantasy and escaping a fraught reality. We’re interested in the unreal realm of freedom that people are trying to access with self-decoration.

Ada
A lot of your imagery is sexy and feminine. There’s nudity in your work, but it’s not necessarily sexual. You also deal with themes of frigidity and rage.

Mattie
Being hyper-sexualized from a young age, your sexuality becomes inextricably part of how you view yourself. Denying it can give you a sense of control. We are trying to talk about what it feels like to be a sexualized object existing in a commodity culture. Humor is important to us as a way of playing with these problematic tropes and situations and turning them on their heads.

Amanda
You can feel unattractive while attractiveness is being projected onto you. You can be sexualized by others but feel frigid.

Mattie
Yes, sometimes the sexiest dressers have been conditioned to see themselves as an object, but I think many of these same people can end up uninterested in sex.

Ada
I remember Pamela Anderson seeing people dressing up as her in the ’90s for Halloween and commenting that she was actually deeply unhappy during that time.

Mattie
This reminds me of what we were saying about the mirror, because I remember reading a tabloid interview with Pamela Anderson when I was really young. They asked her when she felt the most beautiful and she said: “The most beautiful I ever felt was when I was on an island for a week and there were no mirrors anywhere.”

Ada
Did you play with dolls when you were little? What were your memories?

Amanda
Like online shopping, playing with dolls allows you to enter into a strange and exciting reality. When I played with dolls I spent the most time setting up intricate scenarios and thinking about what would happen. Not much was happening physically, but so much was happening internally in this parallel doll-world.

Mattie
My mom and my grandmother loved dolls. They got me into these German dolls called Götz Puppen. I remember connecting with these objects and brushing their hair, changing their clothes. Then you grow up and you start treating yourself like a doll. It’s a double-edged sword. Fashion dolls were once the way that fashion trends were communicated throughout different physical places, before the preponderance of print media. A fashion house would send a doll to the next village or city and that way they could see what was available.

Ada
I am curious about how your exploration of the feminine relates to the masculine. I am thinking of alchemy and the feminine and masculine not necessarily as embodied in people, but just as energy.

Amanda
We talk a lot about how we actually feel like we have more masculine personality types, which is interesting. People take the name of our project very literally. We are women creatives, but it’s not so much a clear political statement, it’s meant to also evoke abstract concepts.

Mattie
We chose the name for its tongue-in-cheek poeticism. It is meant to be a nod to how fashion is something that has come to be associated with femininity in a way that sometimes discredits it. But self-adornment is not a strictly gendered experience. We are trying to engage in nuanced questioning of these topics rather than make definitive statements.

Amanda
Personality traits aren’t inherently female or male, masculine or feminine. But in terms of what is socially considered feminine, people’s perception of the work that we do is that it’s hyper-feminine. Yet the labor we put into it is very ambitious and assertive, and it takes a certain confrontational attitude to get it done. In that sense, you could say the drive behind the project could be interpreted as masculine.

Mattie
The fact that our title references the history of women is meant to be provocative and defiant. We are at this point in feminist discourse where we are once again asking: What are women as a category? Who gets to hold claim over women’s bodily autonomy? Throughout time the concepts of masculine and feminine have constantly shifted. We’re interested in investigating the history of ideas and attitudes towards the two, and how it shows up in clothes, fabric, and objects.

Amanda
I think what we’re doing is relatable to everybody in some way because it is clothes. But some people find the things that we’re looking for absurd, and don’t understand our fervor. One person’s trash is another’s treasure.