Dee Fontans
Dee Fontans is an internationally recognized performance artist, fashion designer, jeweller and spoken word poet. A pioneer of wearable art in the province, her practice draws on a wide-range of materials and post-modern ideas concerned with gender and the body. With a focus on the female body, Fontans challenged fashion industry norms with humour and imagination related to Dada art.
Fontans’ training included fashion design and construction at Parsons the New School of Design (New York City, 1981-84) and a BFA, gold and silversmithing (New York State University, 1984-86). In 1991, she brought the Wearable Art Movement to the Alberta College of Art + Design and taught Wearable Art, Jewellery and Metals at the college for 25 years until 2016. She produced wearable art under the title ‘Outing The Body’ (OTB). OTB made its debut in a 2000 exhibition (Stride Gallery, Calgary) followed by a performance art show, Outing the Body: Exhibition in Motion (Epcor Centre, Calgary, 2002). Fontans curated wearable art for the 55+ Alberta Senior Games, (Calgary, AB 2013).
Her materials can be of a conventional kind like fine silver for jewellery, or the more unconventional as in Pumping Fashion where she recycled and up-cycled bicycle parts to make bracelets, earrings, arm and leg bands shown at IO Gallery (New Orleans) and seen on the runway in Calgary's 2014 Make Fashion, featured on the Global TV News Hour. More recently, her professional focus has been in costume design and fabrication for the movie industry. She was nominated for an Alberta Rosie Award (2016) as lead designer in the film ‘The Northlander’.
Fontans’ training included fashion design and construction at Parsons the New School of Design (New York City, 1981-84) and a BFA, gold and silversmithing (New York State University, 1984-86). In 1991, she brought the Wearable Art Movement to the Alberta College of Art + Design and taught Wearable Art, Jewellery and Metals at the college for 25 years until 2016. She produced wearable art under the title ‘Outing The Body’ (OTB). OTB made its debut in a 2000 exhibition (Stride Gallery, Calgary) followed by a performance art show, Outing the Body: Exhibition in Motion (Epcor Centre, Calgary, 2002). Fontans curated wearable art for the 55+ Alberta Senior Games, (Calgary, AB 2013).
Her materials can be of a conventional kind like fine silver for jewellery, or the more unconventional as in Pumping Fashion where she recycled and up-cycled bicycle parts to make bracelets, earrings, arm and leg bands shown at IO Gallery (New Orleans) and seen on the runway in Calgary's 2014 Make Fashion, featured on the Global TV News Hour. More recently, her professional focus has been in costume design and fabrication for the movie industry. She was nominated for an Alberta Rosie Award (2016) as lead designer in the film ‘The Northlander’.