domestic veil | 2006 |
Oklahoma State University, Tulsa, OK
Installation overview and details; 10' x 14' x 50'
Inkjet prints 44" x 36";
Photographic books 12" x 20" x 3";
Chair / shelf assemblies
Concept / Design / Build / Curation by the artist.
Featuring photographs by: Ja'Nice Mitchell,
Richard McQuillar, Diana C. Kendrick,
Julie A. Remy, Ashley N. Cooke, Sam Dylan Ewing
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In this passage of American time...
we've given away our privacy - again - given over the scraps of "our" domestic scene to some greater authority in it, again to some media re-definition of what it is. Perhaps there were some spurts, some explosive moments when we gave easily, (it would seem) but mostly, silently, in tiny doses, our private has simply become something else, (or someone else's). And most often we don't even recognize it. It's gone.
Where is our home? Maybe it's in an airport or a shopping mall, being carried out over a cellular phone, offered up to anyone within earshot - made available to those we now allow to track us, to listen in, to log, (even the books we read). Our home is a blog or an online profile defining our "I" by attaching us to public things, to products which masquerade as an ID for one.
The snapshot, once shared only with begrudging friends through the photo album and the sometimes mortifying home slideshow, is now pasted and posted online, shamelessly broadcast for anyone to see, to collect, to use. In this process though even the "snapshot" no longer recognizes (it)self. Once it had only to prove the familial. Now the snapshot is tainted irreversibly (?) by the demands of the celebrity scene. We must now be rock stars, movie stars, politicians in these images. We must be "public" property. We must be perfect. Most of all we must tell that we have joined, that we have nothing to hide - by proving that we have nothing else, in fact, to show.
The photographs in this show offer glimpses of this new domestic (image) scene but thankfully, honestly, they reveal a population in retreat - a photographic "hiding" that most often denies you entry. There is no revelation. These images do not join-in. What is exhibited here is the reemerging veil. And just what is building, lurking beneath these flat planes will remain there.
It is not for you to know.