“On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind. The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Yellow House #1, Collegetown, Ithaca, New York, 2018, Digital Inkjet print
I Hate this Picture, She Said, 2018, Digital inkjet print
We Went to a Party at Yellow House #2, Ithaca, New York, 2018, Digital inkjet print
I Don't Want to go Back. I Want to go Home, She Said, 2018, Digital Inkjet print
This series was made in response to reading The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It is an eclectic finding of images; a searching through of archives; a female self awareness in environments; an internalization of the color yellow. To look for the color yellow: watch the gap, warning tracks on Long Island railroad platforms, black-eyed susans, certain state license plates, dandelions in baseball fields, sundresses, itsy bitsy teeny weeny polka dot bikinis, yield signs, and double yellow road lines, is an aesthetic and artificial structure that dictates the series. The color yellow is a thread. The images are outside of their normal environments (a historical archive from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, an archive from my mom’s brief modeling career, and my personal archive of the color yellow appearing in my environments). The images are put in dialogue with each other to create parallels that would otherwise go unnoticed. What does the color yellow represent in our environments? And by questioning the imposition of the color yellow in our environments what can we also question?
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