Six Decade Series (2014)
artist statement
Life today is far different than it was sixty years ago, as are images of home and of the domestic realm. White picket fences and two-point-five children are faded concepts; new images of home have risen to take their place. Few of us actually carry on traditions of the iconic American Dream-era in which our grandparents lived and into which our parents were born.
Through text and collage I strive to showcase social expectations past and present: gender roles, performance within the domestic realm, and partial thinking. By utilizing illustrations from the intensely gendered, rigidly constructed 1950s and re-contextualizing these images for a twenty-first century audience, I begin to explore how our ideas of home and notions of domesticity and gender today reflect those held nearly six decades ago.
Is there an ideal family, an ideal domesticity? Has home ever been ideal, or are we still projecting mediated images from our past, images which were perhaps never truly representative at all?