Not There is pleased to present Separates, a collection of monumental soft sculptures by Los Angeles-based designer Wayne Kastning.

In 1880, Edgar Degas sculpted a teenage dancer of the Paris Opera Ballet; his only three-dimensional work to be publicly presented in his lifetime. It was modeled in wax, at one third life size, with a real cloth bodice, linen slippers, a tarlatan tutu, and a plait of human hair tied with a silk ribbon. Until that moment, figural sculpture had been dominated by hard, enduring substances such as marble or bronze, granting works of art the ability to outlive their mortal subjects. The bewitching and unconventional use of actual materials to render the waxen adolescent may have been the first breech of its kind in the history of sculpture.

The seven works that compose Separates—made of heavy canvas and stiff crinoline—inherit the disappearance of representational materiality from Degas’ dancer (the cloth tutu is a cloth tutu), as well as the scalar rift between figural size and material constraint (the dancer has been reduced to a third the size of fourteen-year-old, but the weave of the textiles and the diameter of the hair resist miniaturization).

At natural scale, a sleeve delimits an arm, but what does it mean to inhabit a sleeve or a pant leg with our entire body? Among these works, Kastning performs misregistrations of measure that favor gigantism. Separate 1: Bishop Sleeve with Wide Cuff operates at a magnification nearly four times life size, implying a body 23 feet tall. Having worked in fashion for over 30 years cutting children’s clothing, ready-to-wear collections for Carolina Herrera, and vestments for first ladies and cultural luminaries, Kastning knows firsthand, that fashion has been defiantly sculptural, and volumetrically exuberant, at least as far back as the 18th century, with the pituitary displays of the robe à la française, and more recently with the oversized silhouettes of Cristobal Balenciaga, Junya Watanabe, Viktor Horsting, and Rolf Snoeren.

In the presence of the seven Separates, one can imagine (by virtue of their diverse inventory of sizes) their ability to clothe or contextualize some of the monumental sculptures of history. In ascending order, a list of works, if completed or repositioned into a standing posture, would figurally measure and magnify in the following way:

The Venus de Milo, 6’8” tall, 1.12 x life size

Charles Ray’s Boy with Frog, 8’ tall, 1.8 x life size

Separate 2: Tailored Pant Leg, 16’ tall, 2.6 x life size

Michelangelo’s David, 17’ tall, 2.8 x life size

(David could manage to wear Separate 2: Tailored Pant Leg if he went on a crash diet).

Robert Therrien’s Table, 21’tall, 3.5 x life size

Separate 1: Bishop Sleeve with Wide Cuff, 23’ tall, 3.8 x life size

(A dinner guest at Therrien’s table could don the Bishop Sleeve with Wide Cuff, though admittedly they might want two of them).

The Lincoln Memorial, 32’ tall, 5.3 x life size

The Fragments of Constantine in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, 60’ tall, 10 x life size

Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog, 90’ tall, 15 x life size

The Colossus of Rhodes, 98’ tall, 16 x life size

(The Colossus could have moonlighted as a party clown tying enormous balloon animals).

Claes Oldenburg’s Floor Hamburger, 126’ tall, 21 x life size

The Statue of Liberty, 151’tall, 25 x life size

(Lady Liberty is tall enough to make Oldenburg’s Hamburger a midnight snack).

The Bamiyan Buddha of Afghanistan, 180’ tall, 30 x life size

The Sphinx, 236’ tall, 40 x life size

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Chiat/Day Binoculars in Venice Beach, 462’ tall, 77 x life size

Mount Rushmore’s George Washington, 540’ tall, 90 x life size

Claes Oldenburg’s Spoon Bridge with Cherry, 624’ tall, 104 x life size

As partial figures, Kastning’s work seems to promise the congregation of a whole, but the scalar differences between pieces resist any real possibility of assemblage into a complete vestment. Garments and figural sculpture are divisible in ways that living bodies are not; from the armless and noseless statues of antiquity, to the intentional fragments of Rodin, the sloper archives of Saville Row, and the headless torsos of dress forms and display mannequins. Unlike bodies, which originate through a complex process of cellular division within an ever synthesizing whole, garments begin as discrete parts that share a set of referents to one another and to the body that they will eventually clothe.

The couture atelier and the tailor’s shop are spaces filled with deconstructed bodies: flattened, dismembered, disordered. Kastning’s Separates are autopsical when a sleeve fails to meet the armhole of a bodice, exposing the inner workings of seams, linings, and boning with unfinished edges that are frayed in places.

The works in this exhibition are not aligned with the fabrics of finished fashion (silks, brocades, tweeds, or velvets), but with the materials of formation (muslin, horsehair interfacing, crinoline, canvas duck), those surfaces associated with working drafts and internal structure. In 1997, Martin Margiela sent a corset down the runway that aped the model’s surrogate body, the linen clad torso of a Stockman dress form. The armature on which a garment is constructed, became the garment itself. Kastning performs a related alchemy when he renders his forms in heavy canvas, the conventional substrate of painting since the mid 20 c., when it supplanted linen and rigid wooden panels as a cheaper and lighter alternative that allowed for larger formats; witnessed in the expansive surfaces of the Abstract Expressionists.

A decade later, in the early 1960’s, Claes Oldenburg assimilated sewing into sculpture as a constructive technique, bringing the languages of draping, drafting, hemming, and stitching amongst the standard bearers of carving, casting, chasing, and gilding. Oldenburg established soft sculpture as a provisional and unfixed form, subject to gravity, and vulnerable to collapse. Kastning’s Separates stand in solidarity with Claes’ soft switches and flaccid foods as self-composed forms of resistance to unyielding traditions of modern heroics.