Window Dressing

February 19 - April 2, 2026

 

Sanzi Kermes presents Window Dressing, a living installation and performance project on view at the Bond Window Gallery, part of Goucher Art Galleries, from February 19 through April 2, 2026. Blurring the boundaries between installation, performance, printmaking, and craft, Window Dressing reanimates wedding garments to question traditions of gender, ritual, and the cultural weight we assign to clothing.

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Kermes has spent several years working with textiles, focusing on the stigma, stories, and emotional residue embedded in wedding gowns—garments often worn once and then stored away in closets and attics. In Window Dressing, these dresses are brought back into public life. They are altered, printed upon, worn, and moved through space, accumulating marks of use and experience over time.

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The exhibition unfolds in two interconnected parts: a continually evolving installation in the Bond Window and a series of live performances. Student dancers periodically wear and activate the garments, transforming them through movement and bodily presence. As the dresses shift across bodies, gender expressions, and identities, the project poses urgent questions: How are meanings carried through clothing? What happens when a dress is worn by a different body? How do rituals change when they are re-performed, re-inhabited, or disrupted?

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Rather than presenting a fixed object, Window Dressing invites viewers to return multiple times. The work may be encountered as a composed installation, as a live performance, or as garments visibly altered by touch, motion, and time. In doing so, the exhibition emphasizes process over permanence, and lived experience over symbolic ideal.

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Exhibition Details

• Opening Reception: February 19, 4-8 PM

• Performance: February 19, 4:30 & 7 PM

• Performance: April 1, 5:30 PM

• Lecture: Threaded Resistance: Fiber, Textiles, and Identity April 1, 5-6:30 PM

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Artist: Sanzi Kermes