housework

3” x 4.5”
inkjet print mounted on board
2007

These small cards commemorate a performance of displaced domestic rituals dealing with the futility of taking care of land that will inevitably be lost and with it, a sense of place and the promise of home. The figure makes useless attempts to disguise, to protect, to domesticate the external world by performing these vaguely familiar rituals. Juxtaposing the initial appeal of the landscape and the photograph with the disconnect of the action and the document of the action offers no resolution.

The work performed or alluded to is almost swallowed in the dominating lines of tree branches and tangles of leaves and grass. These images invoke something unsettling in the futility of the domestic work in the natural setting. Why is the woman hanging floral wallpaper inside a nearly dead tree? Is something coming out of to woods or is she cautious of being caught in this place? Why is she tagging the tree limbs? What will hanging a sheet in the tree do? Will these actions prevent something from happening or cause something else to occur? Are they ineffectual demonstrations or compulsive repetitions?