Artist’s Statement
More than other media, photography invites the viewer to believe they are looking through a window of sorts. Many people believe that if they had been on the scene, they would have observed exactly what the photograph depicts. I use this confusion to seduce the viewer into the drama of my work. For the past few years, I’ve preferred to work in the fashion that the critic A.D. Coleman has defined as the “directorial mode,” where scenes are arranged in front of the camera. Coleman says, “The directorial mode peremptorily challenges our long-cherished assumptions about the transparency of the photograph, its purported neutrality, its presumed objectivity; insistently undermining the credibility of the photograph, it puts the image in question.”1
My recent work has been concerned with re-imaging mid-20th Century domestic life. Images of the perfect family, perfect wife, and perfect life dominated advertising and television in the 1950’s, a period critical to the visual sensibilities of the post-war generation. Fifty years after the fact, this imagery evokes nostalgia for less complex times, but the visuals are, of course, loaded with messages about expected behaviors and attitudes.
Mid-century advertising aimed at women often depicted mothers and daughters dressed in matching outfits, as if nothing but size separated the girl from her domestic future. Kitchen appliances and recipes for food also dominate magazine ads. Drastic changes in eating and shopping habits of the American public were hastened by advertisers creating markets for convenience foods created for military use during World War II, often resulting in Frankenstein-like creations such as the “Red Crest Salad” which combined tomatoes and pickles with strawberry Jell-O.
These facts inform the humorous images in Out of the Picture, which uses the format of a double-page spread and appropriated magazine imagery, along with narrative scenes I create for the camera. The skin tones of the women in the images are reduced to 50% opacity and their forms are outlined with white paper-doll style tabs. The ads from 1950’s era magazines act as foils to both subvert and reinforce the main image narrative. As artist Hank Willis Thomas says, “Advertising’s success rests on its ability to reinforce generalizations around race, gender, and ethnicity which can be entertaining, sometimes true and sometimes horrifying, but which at a core level are a reflection of a way a culture views itself or its aspirations.” The images are created to depict aspect of 1950’s suburban life that reflect these aspirations and dreams, and comment wryly on the foibles of human behavior.
The Life-Size and Other Lies series is captured with traditional film methods, but scanned to digital files to allow larger prints to be made. The fortuitous “brand” name of the pink child’s kitchen set that was the geneses of this series is integral to questions that have motivated my work for the past few years; questions like, “what, exactly, is life-size?”, and “how are size and power related?”. The claustrophobic quality of the space pictured is enhanced by a room that is scaled to the child’s kitchen set, not the models populating it. The models don’t “fit”, echoing the real life response of many women performing Sisyphean domestic tasks. They wear kitchen aprons that are emblematic of homemaker – the desired goal of “Rosie the Riveter” in the post-war move back to the home front. As a symbol of achieving the status of perfect housewife, the non-utilitarian “dressy” apron is worn with pride for entertaining in the home, emblematic of a nuclear family surrounded with new products that would ensure their happiness.
The scenes depicted outside the window of the confined space are from slides taken in the 1950’s that I find at garage and estate sales. Maybe the only escape from the stifling kitchen is into a world that no longer exists. To support this reading, I intend the described space to be perceived as hovering between “real” and “studio” settings.
Working on the Ties That Bind series, I became interested in aprons as a formal and conceptual element as I pondered the meaning of the popular, non-functional aprons that were often worn for entertaining in the 50’s. The fabric choices were often sheer, sexy materials and both call attention to and provide coverage for the genitals. Are aprons domestic loincloths?
Aprons began to change from their utilitarian usages when Victorian house matrons started to embellish their aprons with lace and handwork to distinguish themselves from the servants. In post WORLD WAR II American, Life magazine and Leave it to Beaver lured Rosie the Riviter back into the domestic sphere with the promise of an idealized family and home life. As a symbol of achieving the status of perfect housewife, the non-utilitarian “dressy” apron is worn with pride for entertaining in the home, emblematic of a nuclear family surrounded with new products that would ensure their happiness.
For the photographs of women wearing aprons, I choose women over 40, those most influenced by the 1950’s media, and photographed them at work, expecting an interesting and slightly surreal juxtaposition of visuals. Recently, I came across a Maidenform brand bra ad from the 50’s - the “I dreamed I was a...in my Maidenform bra” campaign; they seem to share the same visual sensibility.
The Tender Sentiments series consists of photograms of objects specifically worn by or associated with women. Photograms are a process that bypass the camera and record an image of a transparent or translucent item directly onto photographic paper. Like socks that hold the shape of the wearer’s foot, clothes contain memory, just as the photogram is a memory of the object laid upon the light sensitive paper. This simple process echoes my concern with memory and nostalgia. My art making is fueled by the discrepancy between these two – how both are comprised of fact and imagination. I often use vintage items from the 1950’s for the sentiments they elicit in the Baby Boomer generation – and the discussion of their messages I hope they engender.
The vintage monogrammed handkerchiefs often used in this series spell out very “unladylike” phrases. The monogrammed handkerchiefs are old-fashioned and seem sweet and dainty, but the sentiments expressed are quite the opposite. This discrepancy is echoed in the process. The completed photograms are the exact size of the original object, and each photogram is slightly different, depending on the placement of the object – undermining both the reproducibility and the enlargement potential of the traditional photographic process.
The Kitchen Coda series are grids of appropriated imagery manipulated by the Polaroid image transfer process. I used this process to allow each coda to integrate images from a variety of sources: TV, magazine ads, stock photography, and old family albums. I’ve arranged the work based on the form heavily associated with the arts of mid-century - the grid. Critic Rosalind Krauss, in her seminal essay on grids says that the grid “announces modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to narrative.” I use this form to both evoke its memory and undermine its hegemony. The grid speaks.
The Scrolls series are inkjet prints on vintage wallpaper depicting a continuous parade of domestic activities. The imagery is appropriated from advertising in 1950’s women’s magazines which were chock full of ads for the newest refrigerators and stoves, washers and dryers; all newly improved and readily available in the post-war economic boom. After a long period of little appliance production during the Depression and none at all during World War II, kitchen appliances were produced and sold in record numbers in the 50’s – over four hundred million dollars in sales in 1955 alone. Yet even these sales figures can’t account for the ecstatic bliss of the models proffering the latest appliances. I chose the scroll format to emphasize that the washing, drying, ironing, and cleaning activities have no beginning and no end. They are, still, never done.
The White Family series uses a large format camera to draw a narrow line of focus in the picture, I aim to invoke a sense of the limited range of options that are available to people based on gender, race, and socio-economic class. Toys have been integral to my work for the last five years. It has been suggested that the life stage we call childhood is a construct of industrial age nostalgia. The playthings we manufacture for children may actually reflect this. Until the early 19th Century, dolls represented adult figures only. And although baby dolls and child figures have been popular for many years, the new action figures seem to emphasize an expanded range of ideas about the human experience. Do these toys reflect changes in our ideas for ourselves? Or can they also perpetuate and influence ideas?
1Coleman, A.D. Depth of Field Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998, p.60.
2Brunetti, John New Art Examiner November/December, 2001, p. 86.
3Krauss, Rosalind E. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986, p. 9.