Brent Green’s (Schuykill Haven, Pennsylvania, 1978) “violin dresses” are hoop-skirt-style structures made of wood, cloth, steel, and violin and cello strings. The sculptures are interactive, and they can be worn and, when rotated, played as instruments by bowing the strings. The ‘dresses’ are intended as sculptural installation, set design, and performance costumes, conveying a multitude of interpretations. This ‘wearable art” conveys the bell-like sway of hoop skirts, and the confining elements of women’s period costumes. Music is central to Green’s work, and he began his artistic career as a writer and musician, before he started drawing cartoons to visualize his music. Green’s work has a slapdash, handmade, folksy quality imbued with sharp, satirical quality, which has led one critic to compare his sensibility to Mark Twain’s. His humor, and sentimentality, DIY aesthetic and fantasy portray our internalized struggle with the onslaught of societal negativity and despondency. The ability to put on your own jerry-rigged “violin dress” sculpture, move through the gallery, playing your own song, while literally dancing to your own tune, suggests the triumph of the fantastical over the day-to-day dreariness of the mundane.