PHILADELPHIA, PA.- White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart presents the work of artists engaged with clothing, adornment, and self-presentation to highlight the inventive design, tactical implementation, or sartorial sense by which we multiply and complete our personalities. On view in ICA’s First Floor Space February 6 through July, 28, 2013, this group exhibition takes inspiration from this definition by novelist JG Ballard—“Fashion: A recognition that nature has endowed us with one skin too few, and that a fully sentient being should wear its nervous system externally.”

Artworks in a variety of media infuse garments with a distinctive sense of pose—the exclusive province of neither the advertisement nor the runway—to stand, statue-like, with an attitude perfumed by immense mediation and an unsteady social sphere. With examples from outlandish costumes to self-published magazines, jewelry to sculpture, performance to painting, this sensibility permeates all fields. Oscillating between branding, self-recognition, sexuality, political uniform, and economic indicator, our adornment always reflects a chosen position in and with society. Told time and time again that ours is a narcissistic age, how do we positively reveal or covertly enact desires before the mirror of our time?

Artists: Hilton Als; Lynda Benglis; Bernadette Corporation; Genesis Breyer P-Orridge; Dexter Sinister with Halmos; Leif Elggren; Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven; Karen Kilimnik; Irena Knezevic; Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin; Erin Leland; Zoe Leonard; Wardell Milan; Paulina Olowska; Seth Price; Rammellzee; Nick Relph; Carissa Rodriguez; Aura Rosenberg, John Miller & Frank Lutz; Nader Sadek; Frances Stark; Catherine Sullivan; Scott Treleaven; and Amy Yao.

This exhibition is organized by ICA Associate Curator Anthony Elms, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.