In
Domestic Dancing (2007) Olia plays the accordeon, while I am vacuumcleaning.
The work from 2007 is presented in
Housework, Gender and Subjectivity: Cultures of Domesticity
Monday, October 29th, 2012 through November
Opening reception, 6:30pm in the Gallery, (on going after the panel)
The Reynolds Gallery, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California
About the Exhibition:
Housework, Gender and Subjectivity: Cultures of Domesticity is an exhibition inspired by the work of feminist media artists working with issues of spectatorship, self, and identity. The exhibit, curated by independent scholar/artist/curator, Molly Hankwitz, focuses upon domestic space as site for the investigation of multiple aspects of gendered subjectivity, from the experience of real women and their performance as spectacularized subjects to notions of women’s place and our response to patriarchal, psychological and social oppression.
Across cultures, the role of the wife, the daughter, and duties of domestic labor within the household from cleaning to cooking to childcare and sex are frequently expected from women. In dominant western media, especially commercial advertising working to maintain a status quo, the stereotype of the perfect “housewife”, her duties and commitment to products remains a powerful ideology despite progress in feminism to speak alternatives. This stereotype has been the object of significant comment and critique for women artists in the history of art.
Housework, Gender and Subjectivity: Cultures of Domesticity brings together a group of contemporary feminist artists who dig into the gendered emotional, experiential and psychosocial domestic realms attached to ‘house’ and idealized versions of womanhood. The artists examine domestic labor and women’s place within it. Guest curator and published feminist, Molly Hankwitz brings together borders and boundaries of domesitc space where the housewife stereotype and the spectacle of domestic labor can be revisited as an art historical idea.
Filed under: Exhibition, Net art, Domestic Dancing, Molly Hankwitz, Reynolds Gallery






When I speak of activities and contexts that don’t suggest art, I don’t mean that an event like brushing my teeth each morning is chosen and then set into a conventional art context, as Duchamp and many others since him have done. That strategy, by which an art-identifying frame (such as a gallery or theater) confers “art value” or “art discourse” on some nonart object, idea, or event, was, in Duchamp’s initial move, sharply ironic. It forced into confrontation a whole bundle of sacred assumptions about creativity, professional skill, individuality, spirituality, modernism, and the presumed value and function of high art itself. Alan Kaprow, in “Art Which Can’t Be Art” (1986) 




