(2024 – present)
In March 2024, I watched Sen. Katie Britt’s “Kitchen Rebuttal” t0 Pres. Biden’s State of the Union Speech on TV. Like many, I was struck by the setting for Britt’s speech: a pristine kitchen, which signaled to many people a patriarchal push for women to return to their traditional roles celebrated in the 1950s. While kitchens are places for exceptional creativity and cultural and family tradition, they are also real and symbolic spaces that women fear being trapped in. Using images from the 1920s-1960s that depict homemakers and new appliances, I create dramatic, and often humorous, narratives about the imagined and hidden dangers to and from women in kitchens and other domestic spaces.
In the words of Frank Zappa in his song, “The Dangerous Kitchen”: “And the stuff in the strainer has a mind of its own / So be very careful in the dangerous kitchen.”
Click images to enlarge and view details.
