Townhouse Trilogy: 3 ink drawings and 3 color prints, as exhibited

Townhouse Trilogy is 3 videos, 3 drawings and 3 color prints: Spellchecker, Impostor, and Walking With Coffee. This project was situated in and around a stylized version of the 1973 Barbie Townhouse, a triple-decker diorama-like dollhouse with the most fabulously over-the-top trompe l’oeil backdrops of a perfect domestic suburban life. I’ve been interested in how space and interiority function emotionally and psychologically: the Townhouse Trilogy became a way to explore how staged domestic space informs a human, and particularly female, experience.

Top Floor: Spellchecker
Spelling has always had a certain kind of magical precision to me, and “spell” has a double meaning, functioning also as a form of magical incantation. I’m always interested in how language encodes meaning, depending on who has access. Spellchecker has me spelling out entire lines and sentences by selected writers as if they were actual dialogue, as opposed to mere strings of letters and spaces. It’s a very private, hermetic language that felt right to correlate with a space made to appear like a child’s private domain.

Middle Floor: Impostor
Impostor shows a variety of characters, all saying things that indicate varying permutations of impostor phenomenon, a condition fraught with unnecessary self-doubt: it’s a syndrome that many high-achieving women and people of color tend to internalize as a sense that they don’t belong where they’re at: that they’re not good or experienced enough; that they’re frauds, impostors. This piece situated on the middle floor, in a sort of 70’s purgatory. The foreground and background were alternately blurred, to strengthen a sense of interior space/interior monologue, and to soften the specificity of the characters.

Ground Floor: Walking With Coffee
The ground floor kitchen became the exit point for a (primarily outdoors) piece featuring myself, friends and family obsessively bustling about, clutching our cups of coffee to go. While I’m guilty of it too, I can’t help but find it funny and sad how fixated Americans are about beverages and meals to-go. While walking with coffee is not a particularly gender-specific behavior, in reflecting on what seems to facilitate drive and compulsiveness, it felt appropriate to scale the absurdity of it by exploiting my over-committed girlfriends in varying states of odd actions.