The Sinistry is the visionary partnership between contemporary artist Bert Gilbert and fashion designer Izzet Ers.
Starting life as an experiment in cross-disciplinary collaboration, exploring the Jungian conception of the contrasexual (the portion of the individual’s psyche having characteristics of the opposite gender) and the syzygy (the archetypal pairing of contrasexual opposites), their practice enacts the conditions for Jung’s postulated “communication of the conscious and unconscious minds, the conjunction of two organisms without the loss of identity."
Their approach also has echoes of surrealist practice – itself deeply imbued in Jungian lore – drawing on the same common reserve of creative intuition as the Exquisite Corpse, the collaborative drawing technique celebrated by André Breton and his contemporaries. In the case of Gilbert and Ers, the act of making does not involve concealment or chance, but centres around a process of creative control ceded and reclaimed, a system of tacit permissions where the work of art evolves out of a fusion of mystery and trust.
It quickly tapped a fertile seam in both artists’ imaginative and thematic hinterlands, first bearing fruit in a manifesto celebrating duality and freedom, painted, stitched and manifested in their Liberation Suits.
Building on its success, they are evolving their hybrid practice to produce a series of works exploring symbolic language and the age-old interplay of pattern and meaning.
From textile pieces and sculpture to works on paper, these pieces work individually, and cumulatively in the form of immersive installations, united by a sense of beauty and immanence, and a commitment to the craft of making as ritual and revelation.
The work is rooted in a mercurial, celebratory playfulness and fascination with the intricate mythologies and layered meanings behind letters, numbers and glyphs.
Their new sculptures and textile works enact a visual hermeneutics encompassing Roman, Hebrew, Hindi, cuneiform, runic alphabets and the artists’ private symbologies drawn from their identities (man/ woman, queer, British, Turkish, Shamanic, Jewish) and hermetic practices. Juxtaposed on masks, hands, eyes, snakes and scales, a deeper potency is activated, setting off new meanings, revealing their inherent instability whilst concurrently calling on the mind to chase, associate and make sense.
