I Resist This from March 4 to April 6th, 2024, at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by James Cho

How do we function as a community? How does one persist as an individual within a social group? By socialising and working together as part of a larger whole. The desire to recreate the metaphorical stitches of community is at the heart of Charlotte Richardson-Deppe’s artist residency project at the Stamp Gallery. Using the gallery as an open studio for visitors to observe her work, Richardson-Deppe sews together a variety of clothes to create multi-person soft sculptures. Whether hanging from the ceiling, on the floor of the Gallery, or on Richardson-Deppe’s workbench, every one of her sculptures are built on a belief in collaboration. She describes her work as a collaboration between her and her garments that she has been using over the course of I Resist This’s run to sew together apparatuses, as well as between her and the Gallery space, her dancers, and of course, visitors in creating a sense of community. 

In listening to her meeting with art classes visiting the Gallery, Richardson-Deppe has made it clear that collaboration is a central force for her work as a whole. Art, in her belief, is usually better when the process is aligned with the final product, so being in the garments after Richardson-Deppe stitches them into her apparatuses is just as important in establishing a sense of community and relationships between the people wearing her garments, the garments, and the Gallery space. As such, the small community formed by those wearing the garments and the sociality of the experience in doing so drives her artwork and performances, in that good work can only be done by doing it with other people. 

This can be seen even in the choice in making all of her soft sculptures monochromatic. Rather than using pants or sweaters of varying colours, Richardson-Deppe chooses to use garments of the same hue for each unified whole. The effect reinforces her focus on creating a sense of temporary community through the unity of colour, which in turn creates a sense of unity between those who wear the garments. Such that even as every individual wearing part of the sculptures might vie for their independence, chafing against the social structures that the apparatuses form, they still create a community, and the wearers must socialise to execute basic movements as a group. 

This focus on forming, maintaining, and sustaining a temporary community through Richard-Deppe’s sculptures speaks to the themes of independence and interdependence that underlie I Resist This. The many apparatuses in I Resist This emphasise these two themes in relation to how we as humans function socially, which as mentioned is similar to her art-making process. Because even though Richardson-Deppe is creating these works independently over time as seen above, she ultimately relies on the Gallery as a social place and as a studio, a place where people can see and interact with her soft sculptures. She needs the space for her upcoming performance on Saturday, April 6, as well as her dancers who will participate in her performance. On the flip side, the Gallery depends on her just the same, since it needs to contain her apparatuses to exhibit something to entice the public to visit it, and just as much as her dancers rely on her to produce the soft sculptures and outfits to perform. 

Ultimately, then, just as stitches unite the garments in Richardson-Deppe’s apparatuses, the multifunctionality of I Resist This as an exhibition, studio, and soon performance is reflected in the many ways that it creates a sense of community. These multiple communities depend on their parts to function as a whole, despite each part existing in and desiring independence from each other.