Domestic Fictions: A Life Less Ordinary

15 Nov

November 15th, 2022

For the 1991 MoMA group show, Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, revered curator Peter Galassi drew together 70+ artists with a varied vision of the interior. Uniting the staged and the documentarian, his show explored domestic mythology and an average life lived: “Reworking the domestic cliches of popular imagery [to] examine the role of the mass media in shaping private lives” (Peter Galassi, 1991). Little could he have imagined that 30 years later the relationship between interior spaces, performativity, and truth, would be such a fraught and essential conversation.

*Women at Coffee Break, Domestic Rituals 1979-1983, Mary Frey*

Today public and private space is blurred and aesthetic performativity has bled into our day-to-day lives. From TikTok to BeReal., photographic representations of domestic life are packaged, shared and sold. Never more than a few seconds away from a camera, #home brings up over 198 million results on Instagram.

With society locked away from almost two years, the Covid Pandemic forced many to align their social representations with images from their domestic lives. Sharing personal routines, fetishizing interior design, or reveling in meal planning, became a way to associate and engage with others. Our new state of existence creating an unexpected synergy to Galassi’s sentiment: “[artists] began to photograph at home not because it was important, in the sense that political issues are important, but because it was there - the one place that is easier to get to than the street.”

*Untitled, Domestic Interior Series, 1995, Jo Ann Callis*

Galassi could never have seen the future we now live in coming, his language falling in part to understatement as though the domestic was in some way small or non-polticial. Yet the onslaught of “once in a lifetime events” that have been thrown at today’s society, makes his exhibition more relevant than ever before. The transient nature of time, the line between staged and real life, photography as means of shaping and creating memory… It is in this new world that ROSEGALLERY’s show Domestic Fictions: A Life Less Ordinary was born.

A restaging of the conversation, Domestic Fictions, brings together three of the original artists in an interplay between contrived photography and the rigorously documentarian. A visual exploration of the interior, as both literal and metaphorical; it highlights non-events being recorded for time as part of the fabric of existence. In celebration of the show’s opening, we spoke with Jo Ann Callis, Mary Frey and Bruce Charlsworth to explore a little further into their work and the importance of sharing domestic tales in photography.

POL: Post Covid-lockdowns how do you expect audiences to respond to works about being at home?

Mary Frey: I never have any expectations as to how my “audiences” might respond to my images, so I can’t really answer this question. However, the Covid-lockdowns were a problem for me. As a photographer who relishes photographing people- and invading their personal spaces- I felt hamstrung at times having to work outdoors. Backyards and porch stoops were my go-to spots and masks, a frustrating accessory to overcome.

Bruce Charlesworth: Several of my photographs at ROSEGALLERY explore a sense of unease about dangers lurking in seemingly benign environments. The pandemic has made that feeling more palpable than ever before.

Jo Ann Callis: My work is about home metaphorically rather than the exact details of the living space. The works in this show come from various projects made at different times, so there is not one specific subject. They are all related to interior environments and what they may conjure in someone’s mind.

One’s reactions could include the emotional comfort or discomfort of home. Because of the Covid lockdown I think people may pay more attention to their personal environment and experience their home more intimately.

*Untitled, Real Life Dramas, 1984-1987, Mary Frey*

POL: Do you think the 30+ years since MoMA’s show has altered the context and meaning of the work you’re showing today?

Bruce Charlesworth: The image chosen by Peter Galassi for the exhibition at MoMA was taken in 1985, six years before the show opened. It had previously appeared in several other unrelated exhibitions. The essential meaning of the photograph hasn’t changed with time, and it helps that the image is an exaggeration. There’s too much cereal in the bowl, and the clock is coming off the wall. The photograph has an attractive lightness, but it also contains uncertainty.

I feel the same way about the meanings of all my photographs. I try to avoid topical references and location specificity to make my images more universal and timeless.

Mary Frey: I sat on this work for almost forty years before I published my books Reading Raymond Carver in 2017 and Real Life Dramas in 2019. In doing so I was faced with the challenge of creating a narrative that honored the original intention of the work, while investigating ideas that would resonate with viewers today.

My abiding objective was to explore the subject of everyday life, and to question all the expectations faced by young woman (like myself) at the later part of the 20th century. As a result, familial bonds, motherhood, housekeeping, and many other aspects of the domestic realm became my subject matter.

Although life today looks a lot different than it did in the 80’s, and life’s choices have greatly expanded since then, human nature has not really changed. As such, I feel the work represented in this show still holds meaning - albeit tinged with a bit of nostalgia - today.

Jo Ann Callis: I don’t think the context and meaning of my work has changed over the years because I and others still view the home as mostly a place of refuge from the outside world’s stresses. Styles may change over the years but the basic needs of comfort remain the same. My interest in the emotions relating to experience in the home has been a theme to explore since I started making photographs years ago.

POL: On social media people are encouraged to share all elements of their lives, how do you feel about that push for aesthetic performativity in the home?

Jo Ann Callis: I am most interested in looking at the posts that my friends send because they have similar tastes and interests to my own and those posts are often about art that I would love. On the other hand most of the routine performative acts that people post are rather boring and therefore I don’t follow them. They are not relevant to the art I make.

Mary Frey: Myself and others were interested in this as an aesthetic idea 30 years ago, so perhaps we were ahead of our time, or prescient at best! The daily visual documentation of one’s own “reality” on today’s Facebook and Instagram pages feels- for me- simplistic, overly curated and is extremely uninteresting.

Bruce Charlesworth: Daily postings expressed through video, text or image are always mediated and often fictionalized for mass consumption. Such sharing is a form of performance, but it’s not always aesthetic. I appreciate people who make good art with limited means and budget to be shared over social media, YouTube, TikTok or elsewhere.

*Girl With Hairdryer, Domestic Rituals, 1979-1983, Mary Frey*

POL: Do you believe there is still such a thing as personal private spaces in a world where personal data and images are sold by billion dollar companies?

Mary Frey: I hope so…

Bruce Charlesworth: As an artist, I’ve long been interested in surveillance as a theme. Early examples include the use of CCTVs in my video installations Surveillance (1981) and Lost Dance Steps (1982), two-way mirrors and a camera over a bed in Wrong Adventures (1984), home invasion, bugging and spying in several subsequent films, videos and theater works.

A photographic example in the show at ROSEGALLERY is the peephole in the painting of a bowl of fruit, originally made to observe a set of identical twins in my video Robert and Roger (1985). These analog modes of intrusion long predate the more insidious use of digital media or the Internet to infringe on privacy.

Jo Ann Callis: I always prefer to see people in person and these experiences are still private. Once you put them out in the world on technical devices they can be traced and I presume if someone really wants to have this information they can find it. FaceTime and Zoom are substitutes for the pleasure and satisfaction of relating in-person to others and experiencing first hand the complexities and subtleties of relationships.

**POL: Pieces from Domestic Fictions are quite diverse, ranging from documentary style through to constructed surrealism. How would you describe your relationship to photographic truth?**

Bruce Charlesworth: Since I didn’t alter any of my pictures of the 1980s, I consider them photographically truthful. They are what the camera recorded. My representations of objects, gestures, architecture, landscape and lighting are stylized. Some of my images are illusionistic, using back projection, specialized lighting, forced perspective, miniatures and cut-out figures. Although the results are photographs, none of these techniques or modes of staging are innately “photographic”.

Mary Frey: Back in the mid 80’s, the notion that a photograph presents an objective depiction of reality was being questioned by many photographers, including myself. How is meaning attached to an image? How does framing, point of view, rendering, and all the other choices a photographer makes influence this meaning? Can a photograph really capture truth? Where does text fit in?

I would argue that a photograph holds its own truth - or fiction - and therein lies its strength. The fact that we trust that the photograph shows us what was placed in front of the camera’s lens- without prejudice- feeds into this concept, giving it credibility. And my work represented in the current exhibition at ROSEGALLERY attempts to do just this.

Jo Ann Callis: Although there is still some sort of assumed veracity in photographs, which is not characteristic of painted subject matter where everything is made up from scratch, I am not interested in photographic truth in my own work. The relevance in my work has little to do with the literal subject matter in my photographs, and yet there is a lingering veracity that I use to create the pictures.

I am careful to construct meaning through lighting, composition, cropping, juxtapositions, and the choice of objects or people presented. In this manner the photograph becomes a metaphor. Truth?

Domestic Fictions: A Life Less Ordinary , a focused curation of staged photographs by Jo Ann Callis, Bruce Charlesworth, and Mary Frey, is open at ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica, from November 19th 2022 until January 14th 2023.

*#38, Man and Nature, 1989, Bruce Charlesworth*

About The Artists

Jo Ann Callis has been widely exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

joanncallis.com

Bruce Charlesworth is represented in the permanent collections of both the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Fundação de Serralves in Oporto, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

brucecharlesworth.net

Mary Frey is part of many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Chicago Art Institute, and the International Polaroid Collection.

maryfrey.com

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