The Beast Boutique has been performed five times. Twice in France and three times in the United States.  This next year it will travel to Paris, Puerto Rico and Aisa.

The Beast Boutique was born out of Jennifer Avery’s Artist Residency with the Hermès Foundation. As the first American artist chosen for this prestigious program, Avery collaborated with seamstresses from Hermès and their fabric printing facilities for four months and created 300 performative objects from opulent gold, silk, cotton and fleece fabrics printed with her drawings, photocopies, and repurposed trash from Hermès.

Beast Boutique deconstructs “Little Red Riding Hood” and merges the personalities of Little Red, Grandmother and Wolf into one body – a patchwork of fragmented identities that inhabit an architecture that is both forest and boutique, and oscillates between selling her dolls (an act of prostitution / commodity / pleasure) and creating them (an act of passion / auto-eroticism / necessity). Both acts critique and celebrate the performance of femininity and Eros simultaneously.

In medieval manifestations of the fairytale, the Wolf asks Little Red if she will follow the path of pins or the path of needles to Grandmother’s house. According to ethnographer Yvonne Verdier, this phrase reveals a passage of time marking the liminal space of child to woman.  Young girls would spend three months with local seamstresses to learn the art of sewing and the performance of femininity and Eros. The metaphor for this transformation was “gathering pins.” While pins mark the path of socially approved expressions of female sexuality, needles imply a wanton maturity. Imagine the gesture of threading a needle through its “eye” in English or “cat” in French, the rhythmic repeated piercing of fabric with needle and thread, and the euphuism seamstresses mutter when they accidently pierce flesh and draw blood (“aii, j’ai vu le loup!” ,“oh, I saw the wolf”, “ouch, I lost my virginity”).

As she walks through the forest of paradox and feminist action, will our heroine choose the path of pins or the path of needles?

This is my dream book about the architexture of poetic space. 

It is quite long, and you may read it here:
https://issuu.com/vinegaraverie/docs/averyarchbook01

Arch(i)Texture “ is limited edition real/eBook exploring the architectures of poetic space or the haptic and liminal relationships of internal and external constructions of home, body, sex, death, religion, dream, decay, ruin, ornamentation, travel, community, childhood, mythology and mortuary sculpture. It consists of twelve chapters: 1. We where so grand in the fish gut Versailles 2. Light: the cathedral and the museum 3. Ornament: the brothel 4. Dilapidation as staunch characters 5. The lost chapter: Carriages, steamships and Baba Yaga 6. (delirium)Doll House Replica copy copy copy scale 7. Threshold: Public Private Internal 8. An Intervening Chapter 9. And there is a grid: Children’s Games 10. Of the Ribcage, frame, and incorruptible corpse 11. Corruptible space 12. Chapter on Lines 13. Facade: the labyrinth, the surrealist house