Installation with furniture, books, lamp, photographs, painting, rocks, and rugs.

Dimensions variable. Open Source, Brooklyn, 2013

A Reeducation evokes a turn-of-the-century reading room. A bookshelf (holding books about utopia, feminism, and economics), antique rugs, photographs, a painting, and natural objects comprise the environment.  A small table displays a book I’ve written and hand-bound. The book is titled A Cure for the Marriage Spirit and incorporates a bit of time travel. The main character, through her research into nineteenth-century feminists and her experimentation with polyamory, resists a linear concept of time as she imagines communing with the dead—comrades who enable her to dream up alternative social conditions in her own time, to rethink marriage, questions of equality and sexual politics, and to challenge what is considered normal. It is my hope that the text’s non-linear temporal construction enables viewer-subjects to similarly engage in formulating future possibilities.

Surrounding the walls are photographs, one of a book that lays open to a poem by Henry David Thoreau about free love, and two others that reference Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a utopian feminist novel from 1915 in which three male explorers discover an all-female civilization—a frame within which to contrast gender discrimination with social alternatives. My photographs present evidence of that civilization, of the former persisting in the present. Moving beyond this example of early twentieth-century binary politics, I’m interested instead in productive dissent among non-fixed subject identities—a model to replace that of the center/periphery.

Free Love

Digital c-print on aluminium. 16” x 20”. 2013. The photo of an open book to a poem about Free Love by Henry David Thoreau.