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Tara Subkoff — news, coverage & facts — IJR

2001–2011: Imitation of Christ

In 2000, Subkoff shifted from acting and began working on a conceptual art project called Imitation of Christ with designer Matt Damhave, enlisting Chloë Sevigny as the project's creative director. The project has been described as a "DIY art collective misconstrued as a luxury fashion label." It took its name from Thomas à Kempis's fifteenth-century Christian devotional text of the same name, as well as a Psychedelic Furs song. Every piece of clothing in the line was sewn by hand and recycled from vintage, thrift and Goodwill shops. Subkoff created pieces of wearable art with fashion shows which garnered her a cult following. Models who wore the pieces for runway shows included actress Scarlett Johansson. Reflecting on the line, Subkoff said: “We were talking about waste, throwing things away, and taking something that's old and making it new again, putting the human hand back into a world that reeks of manufacturing. It felt very appropriate to do that in 2000."

Subkoff and Damhave created four collections together, and the shows were described as "guerilla-style, at least as much performance art as they were about [Subkoff's] refashioned, hand-sewn vintage clothes," with the project's earliest exhibitions taking place in a funeral parlor in the Manhattan's East Village. In 2003, she also collaborated with Bernhard Willhelm on a fashion collection inspired and authorized by Roberto Capucci.

After Subkoff and Damhave parted ways, she continued to design pieces for the line through 2006. In 2007, Subkoff sold the label to Josh Sparks, the former chief executive of the Australian label Sass & Bide, for a reported $2 million. The following year, in 2008, the label went out of business. That same year, Subkoff created four capsule collections for the women's fashion brand Bebe. The collections were successful, selling out within days, but Subkoff later reflected that she was dissatisfied with the collection, saying: "I missed the larger ideas," she said. “I missed creating art."

2012–present: Directing and other projects

In 2012, Subkoff revived the Imitation of Christ label and began working on more pieces, shortening the brand name to simply "Imitation." The same year, she created a ten-day art installation and continuous performance piece at the Carlton Festival of the Arts in São Paulo, Brazil. She also conceptualized a performance piece in a group show curated by Dimitri Antonitsis in Hydra, Greece.

She exhibited a three hour-long installation at the Bortolami Gallery in New York City during the 2012 New York Fashion Week titled "This is Not a Fashion Show," which featured a girl's choir in leotards performing “Carol of the Bells” (intimated as a "slight to Yuletide consumerism") and "performers aging from 8 to 70 pruned and posing in front of antique mirrors lining the gallery walls." In explaining the idea behind the show, Subkoff said: "We are a society that only sells commodities. We do not create anything unless it's to be bought and sold, so the idea of doing something where there isn't a commodity to sell, or what the commodity is to sell is very confusing, is extremely interesting to me."

In 2013, she collaborated with Milla Jovovich on a filmed installation in Venice, Italy titled Future/Perfect, which had Jovovich enclosed in a glass house, surrounded by boxes with consumer logos, artwork, and clothing. Though working predominantly in art, Subkoff also had small roles in several films, including Tanner Hall (2009), How Do You Know, and the horror film Abandoned (2010), with Brittany Murphy.

Subkoff made her directorial debut with the horror film #Horror (2015), which details a group of wealthy adolescent girls who experience a night of violence and terror after a social media game is tinged with cyberbullying. The film was screened out of competition at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, and was picked up for distribution by IFC Midnight and given a limited theatrical release in November 2015. According to Subkoff, she conceived the film after a conversation she'd had with her friend's daughter: "[The idea] started because I asked my friend's daughter, "What is horror, to you?" This girl was cyberbullied very badly... Now, I was bullied badly as a kid, but I could always change schools. I could always go home. Now you can't...when bullying follows you home, and there's no escape and no end, to me, that's horror. And to so many girls, that's just life." The film received mixed reviews from critics.

In November 2019, Subkoff exhibited a multimedia art installation at the Museum of Modern Art. The following year, she revived the Imitation of Christ project, holding a show at Garvanza Park in Los Angeles. In the spring of 2023, she exhibited an interactive multimedia performance featuring various artists, titled "‘WHAT IS COMING AND WHAT IS GOING", in Los Angeles.