Ellen Grevey

DOMESTIC PROJECTION

Some Space Between envisions the city as an organism; I see the household as a smaller organism within it. How is its function altered as society's networks broaden or dissolve? Urban expansion and the development of digital communication have changed the nature of human interaction. What changes occur within the home, does the nuclear family still exist, and what are the effects of those evolutions? Woman is at the heart of the domestic sphere, throughout history and across cultures. The 1970¹s feminist movement in the U.S. shattered the myth, rendering the Donna Reed archetype a nostalgic commodity. Those glacial rules, regulations, expectations and limitations have begun to melt away. My generation of American women is in a space between the rigidity of outdated conventions and a real comfort with modern circumstances. In my artwork, I use images and icons from that "woman's world" as expressions of the phenomenon of betweenness. For the exhibition I presented a large outdoor video projection of a woman doing housework in 1950's kitchen and attire, symbolizing the space between inside and outside, past and present, public and private space. The twenty-foot tall woman rippled over the old brick exterior of a defunct downtown apartment building, and slipped through the windows and across interior walls. She gracefully washed and dried dishes, donned her apron and removed it, oblivious in her moving-picture world. For the viewer there was a distancing effect, as in cinema, but due to the nature of the site, also a sense of history and nostalgia, and of irreversible change.

Ellen Grevey
ellengrevey@earthlink.net