Knitwork

With his first solo exhibition in Estonia, Markle raises questions about the future appearance of fashion and the possibility of individual expression of dress for machine-based life. The artist uses a lens of expanded fashion and speculative design in combination with craft to examine narratives of (be)longing on a post-human planet that has been left to process the residue of humanity's everyday consumptive habits.

At the center of the exhibition are three large-scale sculptural objects knit from post-consumer plastic on special wooden tools made by the artist. The knitted pieces are based on the concept of "second skin," such as clothing, architecture or environment that extends one's existence. Here Markle playfully explores the absurd notion of a humanless fashion system to challenge late capitalist consumption patterns and human-centric ideas of identity.

According to the artist, fashion is by nature a form of projected nostalgia – a remembrance of things to come, simultaneously impossible yet very real. It is (dis)located somewhere between utopian and dystopian futures but never comes to rest easily in either realm. It is this tension inherent to fashion that makes it suited for investigating different ways of being. Knitting as a craft and tool for garment making consists of a series of repeated loops and is often based on a pattern of symbols that can be related to the language used by computing systems. This exhibition speculates on the persistence of craft and its ability to communicate with future forms of intelligence.

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