AMERICAN APPAREL.L from Alien Buddha Press.

AMERICAN APPARELL by Kristine Snodgrass

AlienBuddha Press 2020

Praise for American Apparell:

Yet, in ending, I want to add that I find the true allure (a carefully chosen word) of American Apparell is the shear beauty of the content. Paradoxically, while the book incorporates a strain of anti-bourgeois, anti-art, it is a work of breath-taking beauty. Perhaps the avant garde is evolving. Snodgrass takes us into a world that, I believe, is as mysterious to her as it is to us. It is an organic world, both cryptic and inexplicable, that might take numerous books to fully define. In the meantime we have American Apparell. Do not miss it!

—De Villo Sloan

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American Apparell is a collection that demands numerous revisits. Each portrait feels like a creed, a collective of fists already held up high. This pulsating kaleidoscopic visual representation of modern feminism revitalizes female independence and identity, challenging the reader not to accept archaic ideas churned out by society but instead to consent to the total disintegration of conformity. Beauty blooms in the wake of necessary destruction.

—Johann Van Der Walt

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The glitch is not the environment of the thing, it is the thing itself. I am less interested in exhausting the definitions of asemic writing and more interested in seeing the possibilities of the glitch. We wrangle the “data bending” on phone apps until we get the desired image. That is creative and productive. This does not impede, however, the obliteration of the original image. My glitches start with ads on my Facebook (on my phone) that offer new complexities when considering its form. We are now introducing Capitalism, data mining, privacy infringement, assumption, targeting, and an inextricable combination of those that can only begin to attack the question of form. I screenshot the ads for t-shirts that appear in my feed (based on the above) that usually show “positive” messaging for and about women, or perceived “feminist” messaging. Glitch apps then layer, destroy, and rebuild what I have ultimately consumed. Then I can resist or subvert by taking ownership of the whole mess. I make it what I want it to look like. There is intention in glitching that is beauty. We know it is not ugly. The ultimate infringement of the digital—our human mistake of knowing and understanding. 

—Kristine Snodgrass

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Kristine Snodgrass strips bare social media advertising this powerful series of images. She tears apart the commodification of Feminism and reimages it back into a viable message. Through Glitch Art she remessages marketing whitewash into an Asemic Poetry of power. She tells a new story for Americans as she redresses a gimmick of fashion back into a statement. She is the writing on the wall.

~ Yrik-Max Valentonis, author of this is visual poetry, iDEAL, and 120 Days of Gomorrah