For Ever After
"Reconciling reality with possibility fuels my life and art. Most days, dreams prevail."
For Ever After
Project Statement
There had been a summer storm, and I was attending to its wrath. Although never a favorite, beyond her seven cheeky housemates, I think I conjured Snow White. The physical gesture of sweeping led me to explore the origins and ramifications of folk and fairy tales as primarily women’s stories, told by, and to, other women. For centuries their themes and subtexts—fear, power, misogyny, silence, privilege, aging, dark woods, dirty dishes—have remained relevant and generative. In the resulting installation, I combine moving and still images, wallpaper, self-portraits, and text, to examine the subversive power of domestic heroines and their stories, real and imagined.
For the video, And They Lived, I combine three experimental shorts: Little Boxes, Snow Job, and Back Talk. Using abstract collage and original and found-footage, I layer diverse representations of women and domesticity as portrayed in cultural and film history: silent films, French New Wave, mainstream Hollywood, and social media. The work moves from a modern-day collector sharing her miniature dolls and their plastic containers on YouTube to a picture window in Revolutionary Road, and a 1950s housewife whose self-induced abortion has gone horribly wrong. Footsteps connect the narratives while native birdsong and a manic technicolor dreamscape attempt a resolution.
For the still images, I’ve paired color photographs with poetic erasures re-cast from Lucy Crane's translation of Little Snow White. The images and text appropriate the centuries-old narrative structure of the fairy tale, yet reclaim the story, inviting a glimmer of hope for women and a more fair and equitable future. With the video stills, I honor the actors whose spirits I invoke in And They Lived, including my own. Reconciling reality with possibility fuels my life and art. Most days, dreams prevail.