Melanie Wolf
Contributing Writer
Through February first, North Central College is showcasing a collection of couture dresses by Chicago multi-media artist Carrie Ann Schumacher. The exhibit, titled “Build Her a Myth,” is free and open to the public in North Central’s Schoenherr Gallery at the Fine Arts Center, 171 E. Chicago Ave., Naperville.
“Build Her a Myth” features Schumacher’s intricately crafted, high-fashion ensembles that are composed from the pages of romance novels. She began using the medium after coming across a discarded box containing 50 romance novels in 2011, which was donated to the library where she was working at the time.
Similar to the novels they are fashioned from, the dresses represent an impossible myth where love and relationships are all-consuming and eternally passionate, while exploring a universal narrative based on the real stories of women.
“The context of romance novels”, says Schumacher, “share certain similarities to the fashion industry, as they both create fantasy, a sparkling seductive world of romance, beauty and glamour. I viewed this as the part of womanhood that is visible, the part that is sold to girls by media as ‘true womanhood’. But then, there are all these less desirable parts that are swept under the rug and invisible, all the sexism and inequality parts that are still prevalent today.”
Schumacher attended Elmhurst College and received her BFA in Digital Art in 2008 and received her MFA in Studio Art from NIU in 2012. She never expected to go into mixed media and originally wanted to become a painter. However, in college she found that she missed the physicality of art and realized her passion for finding and transforming discarded objects.
Schumacher describes herself saying, “I’m that girl who wants to adopt all the dogs who don’t have a home, who wants the Christmas tree that is lopsided and missing most of its needles. I have this inherent need to rescue and fix. Thusly there’s this part of me that loves taking things other people find ugly and giving them a new life.”
