Mónica Martínez

New Perspectives is a cohesive collection of garments created with the silhouettes and cutouts that came about from shadow manipulations. Living in the city of New York I see many shadows created by the buildings that are typically reflecting on a flat surface produced by a motionless object. I wanted to reevaluate this traditional perspective of a shadow and see the new possibilities in patterns, shapes, and levels of opacity. I explored these through experimentation on textiles and bodies. Utilizing textiles, I created fabric manipulations, such as cutouts in leather, to using buckram making an architectural silhouette that helped raise the garment away from the body to create the shadow. The placement of these shadows are done on a 3D figure such as the body to see the way the shadow curves and react to a surface that is not completely flat. This allowed for the creation of a new perspective with shadows on the human body through a garment that has strategic cutouts, allowing for the wearer to have an ever-changing look with the different shapes the shadows create on the body.