Live, Laugh, Rococo
Live, Laugh, Rococo (2021) is an interactive, multimedia installation that employs feminine-coded aesthetics of America's twenty-first century with French rococo aesthetics of the eighteenth-century. My installation draws a relationship between critiques of rococo art with the present-day mockery of "live, laugh, love" signage (and its aesthetic variants) to confront gendered hierarchies of taste, morality, and "high" culture in art and society. With a deliberate use of humor, parody, and absurdity, my installation considers why tropes of tackiness, shallowness, excessiveness, and "bad taste" are historically associated with femininity and women consumers, while exploring its potential to destabilize the expectations of fine art in the contemporary gallery space.
The tactile surfaces of the installation evoke the rococo's visual language of sensuality, artifice, and playfulness. The fur rug, sequin boards, and music boxes invite viewer's touch and artistic collaboration. Shifting the viewing experience from purely visual/optic to haptic provides us with new ways of accessing value, knowledge, and agency through alternative meaning-making systems that celebrate feminine modes of expression.
Live, Laugh, Love is informed by feminist research on the French rococo and the conceptualization of femininity in the eighteenth-century, including art historian Melissa Hyde's various analyses on Madame de Pompadour and Francois Boucher, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth's essay on agency in representation, and Madelyn Gutwirth's research on the gendered rococo as political provocation.
Details:
The tactile surfaces of the installation evoke the rococo's visual language of sensuality, artifice, and playfulness. The fur rug, sequin boards, and music boxes invite viewer's touch and artistic collaboration. Shifting the viewing experience from purely visual/optic to haptic provides us with new ways of accessing value, knowledge, and agency through alternative meaning-making systems that celebrate feminine modes of expression.
Live, Laugh, Love is informed by feminist research on the French rococo and the conceptualization of femininity in the eighteenth-century, including art historian Melissa Hyde's various analyses on Madame de Pompadour and Francois Boucher, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth's essay on agency in representation, and Madelyn Gutwirth's research on the gendered rococo as political provocation.
Details:
- Wall 1: Portrait of Louis XIV (1701) by Hyacinthe Rigaud (24 x 36 in) and The Oath of Horatii (1784) by Jacques-Louis David (22 x 28 in). Image files downloaded from Louvre website, digitally modified with white text, and printed on matte paper. Hung in refurbished rose gold frames. These paintings were chosen to symbolize the conclusion of the baroque era through Rigaud and the dawn of neoclassicism through David- a mark of what came before and after the rococo.
- Wall 2: Pink and white damask wallpaper, reversible sequin fabric board (24 x 36 in) presented in a refurbished rose gold frame.
- Wall 3: Interactive reversible sequin fabric board (16 x 20 in) presented in a refurbished rose gold frame.
- Center: Faux sheepskin fur rug, French "Louis XV" style wooden table, lace fabric, handmade cabbage roses (tulle and ribbon), antique music boxes, decorative vases with silk roses and artificial flowers, floral teapot and plate on lace medallions, and a rococo figurine dressed in eighteenth-century fashion.