The Loves of Aaron Burr:
Portraits in Corsetry & Binding: The Film
Historically, the Georgian woman was viewed as a body without a voice,
but this group of women were modern because they wrote expressively
and accessibly. Employing my skills as a couturier I've recreated bodies of their works from which to reanimate their voices. Because letters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were written with an eye to “appearances,” discerning the truth requires reading between the lines. My approach to history employs feuilleton, a hybrid of gossip, melodrama and weird news that illuminates these highly volatile lives.
These women lived during an era that’s a unique and little examined period
of creativity and revolution between the colonial founding and the repressed prudery of the Victorians. In 1792, Burr was near solitary among the founders to contend that not only were women as intelligent as men, and should be educated as such, but that they “have souls.” Many of Burr’s muses were among the most literate of ladies of the Revolutionary era.
The narrative of the film The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding follows the design process from the workroom to the exhibition
of the corset portraits of nine women in the life of Aaron Burr at the Morris-Jumel Mansion, the very place where many of these women’s stories took place. Following the film, there will be a discussion on the feminine arts in colonial, revolutionary and Federalist New York as told through these ladies’ material culture, fetishism, ephemera, and letters.
Drawing connections between her own interpretive work and the historic corsets exhibited in Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette, Camilla
Huey will speak on the changing architectural, structural, and functional forms of
corsets, corset-making, materials, and methodologies. The artist employs these
forms in her unique approach to analyzing portraits of nine 18th- and 19th-century women. Through ephemera, fetishism, material culture, and texts, the artist invites
the audience to follow both design and historic research as she explores biographical narrative. She will bring selected works from her exhibition, The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding, Morris-Jumel Mansion.
Preview May 7, 6pm Bard Graduate Center, 38 West 86th Street, New York City 10024, $25 RSVP programs@bgc.bard.edu
The Premiere of The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding with select works from the exhibition at the Morris-Jumel Mansion. Manhattan's oldest house the very place where the lives of these women, filming and exhibition took place. A reception and screening with discussion to follow. View the works of Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Colonial Arrangements before.
Premiere May 14, 6pm Morris-Jumel Mansion, 65 Jumel Terrace, New York City 10032, $25 RSVP visitorservices@morrisjumel.org
Camilla Huey (artist/couturière) has exhibited artwork at the Bard Graduate Center
and the Morris-Jumel Mansion in New York City. Her exhibit, The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding, paid homage to the women who surrounded and influenced this controversial founding father.