You’re Invited, 2024, is a participatory floor installation that invites guests to enter into a 1950s interior and a 2024 life size blueprint that are positioned adjacent to one another. You are invited to walk on the piece and engage with the labyrinth of the life size blueprint space.
The 1950s room, at left, is modeled after Marilyn Monroe’s home in Los Angeles. In mid-20th century interior design, rooms were small and conditioned to allow for certain roles and expectations of behaviors that were acceptable by certain pre-scripted rules, almost like the actors in the theater for stage direction. The focus of the home was to sit as a family in front of the new technology, the bubble television.
Cross over the red TT (Time Travel) markings at the doorway to move from a time period that was more cookie cutter and dollhouse design to our current state of change and open perspectives. The blueprint floor transitions from the faded out vintage past to a brighter blue in the contemporary scene, with a giant flat screen, wifi, modern kitchen and living area. The open concept design feels larger, less constricted and more inclusive psychologically.
As you walk on the floor installation, a surveillance camera allows others to see you in the space from a close-by monitor. Here you are integrated from the life size blueprint into a monitor. This allows the visitors to view how we interact with the architectural floor plan from the past to now. These social spaces can dictate behaviors and expectations of how to perform in a visual labyrinth where we move slowly and consider spaces and their implications.
The large-scale photographs on the walls are in white ornate frames, giving the sense of large windows, one positioned near the 1950s floor,Dream Houses, and another in the 2024 space, calledEnvisioning the Invisible.Dream Housesshows a drawing by Nicole Cohen of a 1950s fashion ad and layers of home design books:Home Master, A Book of Home Planning, A Book of Bungalows. The instructional books were meant to dictate clear structures for scripted spaces. InEnvisioning the Invisible, the artist is present and is overlayed into a frame of a work of art and next to plans of the Monsanto House of the Future designed in 1957, envisioning what the future might look like from the past.
