“Home became… a place where others judged your worth as a homemaker and a wife, even as a person. Home became a container for never quite measuring up.”
— from “The Home In My Head” by Jennifer A. Watts
ROSEGALLERY is pleased to present Domestic Fictions: A Life Less Ordinary, a focused curation of staged photographs by Jo Ann Callis, Bruce Charlesworth, and Mary Frey. A throwback to the charged, introspective themes of MoMA’s 1991 group show Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, curated by Peter Galassi.
The exhibition will open on the 19th of November, 2022, and will be on view until the 14th of January, 2023.
ROSEGALLERY pays humble homage to Galassi, exhibiting works from a trio of artists who all contributed to his luminary-laden group show. Callis’ close-up photos of her own fastidiously-crafted tiny furniture pieces fetishizes the banality of “interior design,” playing with lighting, shadow, perspective and textures to elicit sublime reaction. While Callis tends to reduce to form, blur mysteriously, or even omit the human subject entirely, Frey reverses this process, instead producing “staged” documentarian photos, so tender, so emotive, the uninitiated would assume Reality was forever and always an extenuation of the frame. And while Callis and Frey conceal their staged quality, Charlesworth pushes this technique out the window, per se, electing for extreme-lighting, steep contrasts, and unreal saturations to instantly signal his human subjects have broken from the Real, instead habituating themselves in unnerving limbo.