The Sitting Room: Four Studies

The Philadelphia Art Alliance, September 2010
Curated by: Barbara Bloemink, Melissa Caldwell, David McFadden, Davira Taragin

Artists: Jennifer Angus, Barbara Bloom, Ligia Bouton, Saya Woolfalk

The Sitting Room: Four Studies is an exhibition that will incorporate newly commissioned works with a post-disciplinary approach to the expanding definition of the term “craft” to create four separate but interrelated installations based on the historical concept of the sitting room. The four artists will create installations that are not an historical recreation of the building as a private home, but an interpretation of the concept of “display”—as a reflection of social anxieties and desires—for a contemporary audience. In addition, the projects for The Sitting Room invite connections between craft and conceptual art practices, bringing the usual assumptions of craft as domestic ornament into the realm of installation art.

For The Sitting Room, Bouton turns to early documentation of Victoria parlor séances to create an installation that explores the intersections between fantasy and reality, desire and deception. As the spiritualist movement gained popular support during the mid-19th century, it was common to receive invitations to parties that included “tea and table-tilting.” These small private gatherings often included local mediums who caused furniture to vibrate and move due to what they claimed was a direction communication with spirits and ghosts. It is not surprising that these events happened in the parlor or sitting room of a private home; this room was accustomed to playing an intermediary role, as it traditionally provided a middle-ground between the privacy of the domestic setting and the larger forces of the public world. Drawing from photographs taken during the later half of the 19th century that attempted to prove the authenticity of these spirit encounters, this installation will recreate the very real desire displayed in these images to communicate with the dead while also employing the artifice and trickery skillful mediums used to ensure this desire was fulfilled.

In “Tea and Table-tilting,” Bouton will create three vignettes or theatrical sets in which hand-painted wallpaper and faux architectural elements will combine with photographic cutouts of the séance participants. These figures, furniture pieces, and additional props will appear like life-sized paper doll pieces. The spirits summoned into each space will be created with projected video, sculptural elements, and digital sound, and their vivid color and mobility will appear, as a means of meditating on human desire, more life-like than the rest of the sepia-toned scene. Here, the artist plays the role of the original medium by constructing an experience where, (with the help of some simple technological slight-of-hand and trick-of-the-eye) the worlds of the living and the dead seemingly collide.