Bedroom Portraits (2023)

EXCERPT FROM:

CREATING SPACE: REPRESENTATIONS & ABSTRACTIONS OF LIVED SPACE (CARTER HELMANDOLLAR, 2024)

​

​

CASE STUDY IN SPATIAL PORTRAITS:

Bedroom Portraits 

​
 

Conception

​

Bedroom Portraits is comprised of 20 representational prints depicting the bedrooms of 18 different people living in Rome, Italy in 2023. The prints are a small catalog of the unique archives that exist in lived personal spaces. With the series, and its later installation, I aimed to develop a collective understanding of created space through the depiction and analysis of the spaces of a specific group of individuals.

 

This project was born from two casual room sketches—an exercise common to my artistic practice for many years. First, a watercolor painting of my own bedroom at the time and the second, a pen sketch of a friend’s bedroom I made while visiting her. When looking at the two side-by-side, I found myself engaged in a new way with the familiar images of beds and personal items. Although these first two sketches were created using different mediums and without the other in mind, their content held a satisfying and dynamic comparison that made them feel united. My own spaces were not a new subject of study for me. They have always been endlessly engaging in the way our own things often are. But the combination of these two drawings of different spaces viewed through the same lens established a certain universality that was new. I felt this shift, perhaps obvious in retrospect, to collecting the spaces of others alongside my own. This widened both the frame of reference for a viewer and the larger themes available to me for analysis. With my friend, I enjoyed comparing the details of our respective rooms and searching the other’s for characteristic features, discovering how they played off one another. Who doesn’t love being a bit nosy into someone else's personal life? And what is more illustrative of one’s personal life than the room where they carry out much of it? The concepts I had been exploring in exclusively my own spaces—themes of personhood, home and homemaking, and individual interactions with material culture—became much clearer and expanded given the ability to directly compare one individual to another. Instead of using myself as a comparable stand-in for a collective, I could just create an actual collective. This was not only in tune with the direction I wanted to take my research, but it was also easily scalable. The more bedrooms I collect, the clearer this larger image becomes. 

​
 

​

Bedroom Recruitment: Sample Group

 

And so I collected. My process began with an appeal to the most readily available pool of bedroom owners I knew, ones who might not startle at my intimate request: my peers. I wanted access to as many bedrooms I could find in the span of just a few months. In order to capture them in the detail I was looking for, I was going to have to ask people to allow me not only into their homes, but into their bedrooms, for several hours. Asking a stranger if you can go into their room and stare at their bed for an afternoon while documenting it in detail is a little bit of an odd request to the average person (although, maybe a fun social experiment for another time). My international program colleagues, all other artists, were good candidates not only because of their convenience—here were 20 or so friendly people living in the same city, who were able to understand my artistic motivations and, on the whole, happy to give me the leeway I needed to work—but they also provided a very engaging research group. 

 

I was able to convince 16 of my fellow students (along with one obliging non-artist friend) for a total of 18 people, including myself, that came together to create an incredibly diverse group despite the similarity in their current paths of study. In other circumstances, I might be concerned that a group of people in the same specialized program would be too similar to one another and therefore not as interesting as a wider sample, but thankfully this group was quite varied. Together, they range in age from 21 to 64 years old, hail from 14 different countries, 4 continents, speak at least 10 different languages, and hold undergraduate and graduate degrees in over a dozen different subjects. They were a worldly group, to say the least. Despite their many differences, they were, importantly, all experiencing the same very specific moment of transition in their lives that captured something of crucial interest to me and my research. 

 

The vast majority of them (16 of the 18) were new to Rome, having moved here only several months earlier, and were going through the same excruciating rite of passage that exists in most major metropolitan areas around the world: housing. They had recently found places to live (either temporary or permanent) in this new city, many with great struggle, and were now going through the process of making these rented spaces their own. I was very engaged with this moment of low-stakes transience and how it may be slightly more revealing than well-established dwellings about the essentials of a created space. My participants had traveled across the country, the continent, and in some cases across oceans to move their lives to Rome. What had they deemed essential to bring with them? How are they establishing their spaces in a foreign city, a foreign country, where the resources and material culture available are so different and the items they can realistically bring with them are so limited? What makes them feel most comfortable and how does that change between those who traveled short distances and those who traveled from very far? It is expected that the answers to these questions will vary widely from one person to another, especially in a group as varied as studied here. This anthropological spectrum of experience holds the potential for a more foundational look into how and why we are able to reflect ourselves in the creation of the spaces in which we live our private lives. 

 

On the other side of that spectrum, however, are my two born and raised Roman participants who have lived in Rome (and Roman suburbs) with their respective families for the entirety of their lives. They exist, for me, in this sample as a sort of quasi-control group, adding a much needed level of comparison to the series as a whole. In the same way relative transience might reduce a bedroom down to a more essential state, one that looks extremely different from person-to-person, the stability of a childhood home is full of moments that have defined and shaped a person over the course of their life, moments that are visible in the objects accrued over time not only by the individual, but by the entire family unit. A space developed over a lifetime—from birth, through adolescence, and into adulthood, collecting mementos from each phase along the way—was equally as engaging to me in this context as the newly formed spaces discussed earlier. They are a welcome variation that adds texture to the overall image. I wonder if it is possible from an outsider’s perspective to pick out these two rooms from the series as a whole. The differences between their established, shared familial spaces create an extra dimension of comparison to the newly formed, mostly single-person households of the rest of the group and vice versa. 

 

​

In Bedrooms

 

This project, especially the initial stages, required much interpersonal coordination and interaction in order for me to collect what I needed; it was an incredibly social project, an aspect that I enjoyed. I arranged individually with each person to find a time that suited them for me to come to their home. For many of the participants, this was my first time communicating, much less meeting with the person one-on-one, and we threw ourselves directly into an intimate bedroom encounter. Other times, this interaction was a text to a good friend to schedule the drawing session around existing plans or to visit an apartment I had already been to many times. I appreciated this range of interaction and found that it was far from limited to our initial encounters. My time in each person’s home was a huge spectrum of experiences that, to me, were just as revealing about the person as I had hypothesized the image of their bedroom would be. It was truly surprising how in tune the process of collecting these images was with my goals of the final prints: the comparison of individuals through their treatment of space. That treatment of interior space was what I had intended to study, but their treatment of the social space created between the two of us became an additional and unexpected layer. Through this project, I had inadvertently initiated the creation of additional social space between myself and the participants. The interaction necessary to create the series encapsulated space as a meeting place between people.

 

Each drawing, and eventual print, was the result of a kindness extended to me. It was truly fascinating, and honestly humbling, to experience the vast array of cultural and personal welcomes. I was offered water, coffee, tea, snacks, and home-cooked meals of all kinds. I started off many sessions with a friendly chat while waiting for a moka pot or cezve to finish brewing and questions of “Are you hungry? Can I get you anything?” On the way to their bedrooms, I met all manner of friends, siblings, parents, pets, roommates, landlords, and neighbors. In the bedrooms, I was given virtually anything I needed to comfortably draw and the leeway to move freely to choose the best vantage point. I tried my best not to disturb or change any part of the room with my presence, to draw everything exactly as I had found it. I enjoyed seeing whether or not a person cleaned up for me. Obviously they all had prior knowledge that I was going to be in their home, looking at their things, so although my goal was a raw and untouched version of the room, it was a telling personality test of sorts to see who made their beds and who decided there was no need to put away unfolded laundry in preparation for my arrival. 

 

I drew for hours at a time while the bedroom’s owner did any number of different things. Some worked or relaxed alongside me—typing on a laptop, drawing in a sketchbook, playing on their phone, reading a book, smoking, or watching TV. I drew in comfortable silences and with long conversations, welcoming each as an extension of that person’s space. Daria asked me to explain what buttermilk was and about a few irregular English verb conjugations when they came up in her book on classic American literature. Luisa and I had an emotional rehashing of the past and present events of her love life. Vittorio made me watch nearly half a season of Desperate Housewives. Heidi, who lived alone far from her son in London, told me how nice it was just to have someone else in the house with her for a while. A few watched me work and would look over my shoulder to check how their bedrooms were coming along. Some left me in the bedroom while they painted, sculpted, socialized, cooked, cleaned, or did laundry elsewhere. Ana did not speak to me the entire three hours I was in her apartment on a rainy Sunday morning, other than to ask me if I needed water and to tell me where her room was—focused on her own project in the kitchen. Nathalia blasted French rap music while cleaning her bathroom and sweeping her floors, asking me to please pick up my feet when she got to where I was camped out. I was completely surprised that I was trusted by multiple people—with little discussion—to be left completely alone in their homes while they left to go run errands, to go to the grocery store, to the gym, or to work. Sitting completely unsupervised in the intimate space of both close friends and distant acquaintances, I could not help but to think about what a massive extension of trust and hospitality had been offered to me. 

 

Also included in the series are three separate prints of my three bedrooms in Rome, a kind of mini series in themselves: Self-Portrait I, II, and III. I chose to include all three, instead of just the most current, not just as a personal record of my time and space in Rome—which it is—but as a small testament to the transience of the city that I mentioned earlier, recording more of the logistical and emotional aspects of trying to establish your own space. Obviously this is a relatively small-scale (and quite positive) example of the true breadth of transience in a city; one has only to look to the many homeless and disadvantaged groups, “their living spaces haunt[ing] the city,” to see the full range of this phenomenon. An estimated 150 million homeless people globally are forced to carve out private space in the public spaces of every city around the world. But for my limited purposes in this project, the inclusion of all three of my own bedrooms is an addition that aims to provide the viewer with the ability to see the development of a single person’s space in specific circumstances over a short period of time in order to provide more depth.

 

Rome, itself, is also a participant in this project. It is a unique city in that it has been inhabited as a major metropolitan area for thousands of years—a scale that is difficult to fully conceptualize. Think back to our initial discussions on the history of space; Rome has existed since the scholars of Vedic India were considering the natural rhythms of space-time. My bedroom visits took me all across the city to many neighborhoods previously unknown to me and past iconic historical landmarks. The scale of time here is just different than in other places: Rome has mastered “the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts.” It is able to incorporate all “its previous accomplishments,” embracing the past at the same time as growing towards the future. Traveling to Megan and Luisa’s took me alongside the Tiber, a lovely walk taken by ancient and modern Romans. My train to Federica’s house gave me a beautiful view of Castelli Romani. The apartment buildings I visited were considered new if they were made after 1600. There was a stone plaque in the lobby of Negin’s building declaring the date of its creation using only three digits. Bianca lives across the street from a temple built in the 4th Century. The history of this city leaks into the walls and rooms of the buildings that reside within it.

 

The experiences I had in each of the 17 bedrooms I visited were deeply human and the resulting images will retain the imprint of a complex, multilayered relationship with space. I treat these drawings as artifacts of those overlapping created spaces—that of their houses and rooms, our social exchange, and my observed depiction of those spaces—frozen in a specific moment in space-time. They will remain, for me at least, as capsules of these moments of personal connection when I existed within their space—as, myself, a brief extension of it.

 

​

Technical Printing Process 

 

After visiting and drawing all 20 bedrooms, it was time to turn them into prints. The final prints were made using synthetic lithography, an uncommon printmaking process that mimics traditional stone lithography through the use of specially prepared grease sensitive “paper”—thin, flexible, and mostly opaque plastic-like sheets that can be cut down to a desired size. This paper allows the user to create a reusable matrix that holds any grease contact, most often in application from a ball-point pen. I chose this method for Bedroom Portraits over the many other possible printmaking options because of its quick effectiveness in creating reproducible naturally drawn marks, like those made by a pencil or pen, allowing for more gestural or detail-oriented mark making. Synthetic lithography is also useful for easy typography and transfer-based stencil making. The process achieves a feat more difficult to create when working with metal or wood, but does not require the expensive and specialized material or knowledge-base of traditional lithography. Because I wanted to maintain the detailed, free-hand sensibilities from my initial observational drawings and to do so fairly quickly (and without a distinct interest in heavy color variation in the final prints), synthetic lithography was on the whole a logistic decision. 

 

When drawing in each person’s bedroom, I began with a free-hand pen drawing of the room from life on normal sketchbook paper marked at the same size as the synthetic lithography matrix. The initial drawings took me anywhere from two to four hours to complete. If I was unable to complete it in-person during the agreed upon time, which happened on more than one occasion, I would take reference photos in order to complete the drawing offsite at a later date. Next, I scanned the drawings, reversing it in preparation for the printing process, and printed out the resulting image. Taking the reverse on standard printing paper, I attached it to a pre-cut piece of synthetic lithography paper, careful to align and match the size. Because the synthetic paper is slightly transparent, I was then able to transfer the scanned image onto the matrix by tracing my initial drawing with a grease-based pen. I repeated this process for each of the twenty drawings. 

 

After the matrix is prepared with the desired grease marks (the drawing), being careful not to transfer any fingerprints to the grease sensitive side, the synthetic paper can be inked. This process involves two large sponges (one saturated in water and the other in a diluted citric acid mixture), an ink roller, and oil-based ink. The matrix is taken to a hard, flat surface and wet completely with the water sponge, drawing side up. The entire material needs to be covered with water, both back and front, in order for it to adhere with surface tension to the inking station so it will remain in place throughout the inking process. Alternating between the water sponge, acid sponge, and a roller evenly covered ink, the ink will transfer only to the grease marks of the matrix if inked successfully, mimicking a simplified version of traditional lithography. The then fully inked matrix can be printed normally onto paper or fabric using any standard printing press. Each of the twenty prints included in Bedroom Portraits is an edition of at least four. 

​
 

 

Spatial Analysis

 

Looking at the prints, we can now attempt to test if it is possible to decipher something about who each person is through their treatment of space. I have presented through existing research and a personal discourse that these lived spaces of the home are essential to our physical expressions of interiority. Now we have the people and bedrooms to analyze for ourselves. We can consider how a known individual is mediating their personal and cultural relationship to space with the specific knowledge of who those people are and what their rooms look like. How is it they are negotiating physical external space and abstract internal space? In what ways does the series engage with existing or produced social space? Although we can discuss specifics here, colored by the intrusion of my perspective, I am aware that many of the specific nuances may be lost on an outside observer—someone viewing these prints with no information about the people featured. Every detail about the background of a person is not discernible from an image alone. While much can be inferred, the expression of the self through physical space is a translation where there is the possibility for something to be lost. There are, however, many details that are communicated effectively. Perhaps there are even certain aspects that are better served in this form. Which details remain clear in this translation? How might information on the creator of a space influence one’s perception of it? At what point does the artist’s depiction separate from the reality of that space as it exists physically? Does it fundamentally change our experience of that space? These are questions to consider in viewing representational spaces. In looking specifically at Bedroom Portraits, I encourage you to search the rooms for what stands out to you, what you can discern about the person that lives there, before you go on to read my more in-depth analysis of the relationship I discovered between what I know of each person and what I found in their bedroom. What can you imagine of the person that created the room space—the primary artists, the bedroom dwellers? Can you imagine, too, the person that created the representational space—the secondary artist, me?

 

The individual that lived there is undeniably present in every single one of the 20 bedrooms. We see personal objects, all with stories and spaces of their own, everywhere. Many people have pictures and art hanging on the wall which I studied in detail in order to recreate in my drawings. In the observations of family photos, postcards, and posters, I traveled around the world and met many new faces. Visiting the bedrooms of mostly visual artists was a special treat because of the private studio tour each bedroom became. I especially enjoyed transcribing the familiar paintings and drawings of artists I worked alongside daily, like those found above the beds of Lale and Giulio. Nathalia has a multi-media sculpture she made hanging from the ceiling that required close observation in order to represent accurately. In the rooms where there is nothing added to the walls, the viewer can still glean information. Self-Portrait I features a sparse set-up and bare walls. This was my first rental room in Rome where I lived for only a few months and the air of impermanence in the lack of personalization is palpable. Heidi had another apartment in her home of London where she visited often; her lack of customization communicates her regular absence from this space and foreshadows, to me, her disinterest with Rome. Some blank walls, though, are less low-energy. The partially bare walls of Chantal and Rodrigo’s rooms are limited to the bedroom, each participant having a larger apartment space that I was privy to at their disposal for their more extensive personalization. The minimalism of Megan’s room speaks to a disinterest in clutter and an efficiency-oriented approach to decision-making, her energy spent better elsewhere when the existing design of the room provides all the aesthetic and practical comfort necessary. 

 

The trinkets—personal and decorative objects—of each bedroom were an especially engaging part of someone’s space that often told a story of their own. What items had been made their way into such an intimate space? Which could I tell came from a home country foreign to Rome? Which items were already there and how were they occupying space together now that they needed to share? How does the furniture and its arrangement reflect the mixed uses of the room? We can see comfort objects like the stuffed bear in Eleonora’s room which was gifted to her by her boyfriend or the bouquet of paper flowers on the shelf sent to me by my mother on my birthday. The larger objects placed around the room were telling too. A desk, a chair, a couch, a bookshelf, a rug—they all accumulate to define needs and preferences. Even if you look exclusively at the beds in each room, you can see the personalities of their sleepers through the patterns on the bedspread and how much (or little) they had decided to straighten them up. Because 16 out of 18 participants were new to Rome, I was curious to see how these people had made the space their own after only living in the city for a few months. How did they go about making themselves comfortable? For the two Roman participants who lived in their childhood bedrooms in a family home—a place we have established as fraught with meaning—how were their spaces different from the renters of the group? Before I tell you which two they are, do you want to try and guess? These two rooms are within a suburban house rather than an apartment in the Center, containing furniture that reflects a dedication to the longevity and quality of a collectively filled home. The beds are easy to imagine a child in. One, I think, can sense the presence of a mother in the decor. They are lived-in and tidy with items on every shelf. I made two trips by train out to the suburbs, first north to the bedroom of Eleonora and then second, west to the bedroom of Federica. How good were your guesses? The answer to this question too, should inform some logic of space. Were any of the renters able to achieve the energy of a long-held home? If so, how did they do it?

 

Thinking more structurally, how are the prints able to hint at spaces nearby? How is a bedroom situated in its larger context? Some windows lead out to streets, to trees, to other buildings, and to vast views. Others have closed curtains or lowered shutters. We can see bikes on an outside deck of Chantal’s room which tells us something about her methods of transportation in Rome and the size of her apartment. We can see the pots and pans of a kitchenette peeking from around a corner in Bianca’s studio apartment and the suggestion of a lofted bed; suddenly we can better understand the shape of the space. The city skyline out Ángela’s window situates her not only on a high floor of a tall building, but the landmarks visible place her neighborhood in the city exactly. My familiar view in Self-Portrait III orients anyone who sees it to the closeness of the neighboring building, the suggestion that there are many other bedrooms closeby. This closeness to others is true of all of the bedrooms, being in a large urban area. We can even see a neighbor across the street in a window of his own from our place in Heidi’s room. Not only is space multiplied by the observations of the bedrooms presented in this series, but there is also this contextual information that suggests infinitely more spaces alongside each.

 

This cultural space outside of the bedrooms, Rome, is present inside the rooms as well. A city with this much history is bound to have a unique relationship to the space it has occupied for so long. There is a specific Italian cultural aesthetic present in many of the rooms. It was always clear to me upon entering a room which pieces of art hanging on the walls were the decision of the owner of a rented space, rather than the person sleeping there. The aesthetics of those framed prints and paintings were always so distinctly Italian—browns and faded jewel tones, Renaissance paintings and flashes of gold. Ana’s flower light fixture was popular with Italians of the last half-century; I have seen it in four other apartments since. The larger structures of the spaces themselves, too, declared themselves as Roman. You will find a very similar structure to the windows and even some of the floor materials across many of the prints. The buildings visible outside of several of the bedroom windows that are featured are often characteristic of different Roman styles. Negin’s room features a beautiful exposed stone ceiling where you can see the barrel vaulted internal structure of the building’s centuries-old architecture. The built-in cabinets of Daria and Megan’s room scream NONNA. Same with the beautifully ornate wooden credenza meant for dishes instead of clothes in my third bedroom in Rome. This huge piece of unique furniture filled and covered with my clothes, books, and pictures (most originating from a home on the other side of the world) becomes an excellent illustration of a bedroom’s mediation between the personal and the cultural. There is evidence of not only individual productions of space, but also the productions of a wider culture and architectural tradition. 

 

This series is also strongly linked with memory. As someone who has always been invested in keeping time, constantly collecting material pieces of my own life for personal posterity and aesthetic archive, this habit of record-keeping is present in the work. I found it satisfying that every single person whose room I visited was interested in seeing the final version of their portrait and many asked for copies of the print to keep for themselves. I assume they, too, were interested in archiving—in keeping something that would consolidate this ephemeral space and moment of their lives into a piece of physical evidence. While I am just as invested in keeping the time of others, finding an underlying empathy in the connection of my spaces to that of another, theirs is not the only space-time present. Beyond an expression and gratification of my personal artistic interests, these prints are also part of my life, my space. A piece of art, no matter the subject, is always about time in the same way it is always about space. Its content describes the moment it was created, both literally and implicitly. In this way, the production of space continues as the prints solidify their bedrooms, their space, their time into an extension of mine.

 

The recognition of a bedroom’s artistic capacity, a place to describe parts of life aesthetically, is fundamental to the prints. These bedrooms—as a result of existing within a larger socioeconomic cultural context and being lived in by people—are full to the brim with a lived expression of visual space that borders on the artistic. The translation of these created spaces into an artistic medium (in this case: drawings, and then prints) intentionally inscribes this lived spatial production into a tradition of fine art. We have a practical application of Lefebvre’s three conditions of producing social space—spatial practice, representations of space, and representational space. The bedrooms, in their place in a larger building, are a physical anchor of social space, expressing the organic needs and wants of an individual and a collective. The prints are representational spaces, encoding the physical realities of the bedrooms into aesthetic culture. There is also, present in the interactions between me and the bedroom creators as we interact to organize the creation of this series, the development of a social relationship. I wonder if you can tell, too, based on the prints who I had stronger social bonds with, which bedrooms I felt more comfortable to linger in because of my closeness with the person that slept there. The creation of this series resulted in the recording and creation of countless spaces, all of them interconnected in a thorough study of space. 

 

​

Installation

 

My conception of how this series should be presented for viewing was constantly influx during the course of its production. The process was a familiar negotiation between the work and product, between creating for the sake of its existence and producing for the sake of consumption by a larger audience. The first iterations were, on the whole, vague and unsatisfying, pushing me to continually reinvent the possible options over the course of more than a year. The process of finding a successful installation became a project within itself. Initially, I thought to keep things fairly traditional without many added elements, hanging the framed prints side-by-side. After some deeper consideration, however, I found this concept to be lacking something fundamental. Following the urge to make the presentation more dynamic, I wanted to create an installation that worked to unite the pieces into the same cohesive metaphoric space—further expanding the project’s existing explorations of overlapping created spaces. The early versions of this new approach continued to fall short in my mind. With nowhere to show this series and other projects taking precedence, the installation question of Bedroom Portraits fell to the wayside for a period of several months. In that time, I let the ideas of how to best present it ruminate. Almost a year after its initial conception, I saw an opportunity for it to finally reach a satisfying final form. 

 

While in the initial stages of planning a printmaking installation exhibition with some fellow classmates some months later, I knew I wanted to try to show Bedroom Portraits and find a solution to its installation problems. Not only did I feel that the full potential of the series had yet to be realized, but I also was intensely motivated to get the project on display in this specific setting, an exhibition space in RUFA, where it could be viewed by the owners of the bedrooms themselves. Although the series had not been created specifically for their viewing, I felt that it was a unique opportunity to show them what the project had culminated into and to see their bedrooms in this new light, presented as pieces of art alongside the bedrooms of others. They would be able to engage directly with the artistic space I had created in reaction to theirs. There was something in that possibility that reminded me distinctly of those first two drawings—of my friend and I eagerly comparing our two bedrooms side-by-side. There was a sense of community to be had alongside these prints, an underlying interest and sympathy with one another. This was a group who’s dynamics had distinctly shifted since the time of my original drawings, as our many interpersonal relationships had developed over the course of two years. The bedrooms, frozen in those first few months together in Rome, had become a marker of the past to be compared not only to each other, but to the new versions of the spaces that now doubtlessly existed—both physically and socially. The personal stake these observers would have in the piece is a rare thing to find in an exhibition and I didn’t want to pass it up. 

 

The development of my research at this time had led me to a study of geometric abstraction (more on that later) and I was interested in trying to implement this line of thought, alongside some of my new studies in multimedia installation, into this earlier work on representational spaces. Artists like Kurt Schwitter (1887-1948) and his 1933 Merzbau home installation came to mind. The work, one of the first widely received iterations of installation art, was the heavily abstracted interior space of his home. Not only is the art in his living space, it is his living space—creating a dynamic and foundational relationship between interior design and the avant garde with this “cathedral of everyday objects”. His dramatic answer to the question of how it is we compose our private spaces is a unique perspective that blurs the conception of public and private. In looking to implement some of the imagery I had been developing in my printmaking work into this installation, I was interested specifically in Schwitter’s transition from his collage works on paper to these large-scale installation environments. Considering a selection of his collages and later installation, one can easily track how he goes about maintaining a consistent visual identity executed across forms. In many ways, intimate space functions like a collage; there is a dialogue between predetermined, concrete realities and our ability to organize them in a way that fills these realities with interior meaning that did not previously exist. Schwitter’s evolution of process emphasizes a fluidity of the depictions of space, moving with stylistic consistency between two and three dimensions.

 

At that moment, Bedroom Portraits existed only in the two-dimensional, but had much to convey about three-dimensional spaces. Instead of presenting the prints as flat objects to be placed on a wall, I wanted to try to bring them out and forward into their own new space. I also found merit in, from some of my earlier installation attempts, trying to force the viewer into an action of peering in and looking at the prints, reiterating a sense of physical voyeurism. At this time, I had begun to develop in a different direction to my work, a more abstract approach to my artistic considerations of space. I was moving increasingly towards geometric abstraction and kept returning to the cube. Initially, I thought this exploration of the abstract was distinct from my explorations of bedrooms, but, the more I continued my research in space, the more clear it became that these two subjects were actually closely related. In light of my thoughts on Schwitter’s work and my struggle to find a satisfying solution for the  installation of Bedroom Portraits, the cube became extremely relevant. A cube quite quickly relates to a bedroom space simplified down into its most basic geometric forms; “a house is first and foremost a geometrical object.” Even my research on the history of the bedroom had led to the specific observation that “the bedroom is a box that is both real and imaginary.” A fundamental connection between my practical and theoretical research had been made and I committed to using the boxes for the installation. 

 

If I built literal boxes, I could create scaled down mini spaces for the prints to occupy which I could manipulate in any manner of ways, pushing the work into that sculptural realm while still engaging with my research questions in an authentic way. My first prototypes tested material, color, spacing, construction, and scale until I established a viable final version. Balancing cost, time, and production, I settled on a thick, warm-toned cartonlegno, a material often utilized in architectural modeling, to use for my pseudo-rooms. Each box had five sides, leaving one side (that opposite to the print) open for viewing. They were sized to fit the 15 x 22.5 centimeter prints snugly against the back wall with a margin of less than a centimeter space between the edge of the print and the adjacent wall (resulting in overall dimensions of 16 x 23 x 16 centimeters). I also chose to paint the interior walls a dark blue to further off-set the blue ink prints and also to include the occasional window, matching the boxes to their corresponding print in order to reflect the space depicted; if the room featured a window or light source from the left, the box would too. Not only was this meant to deepen the connection between the print space and the box space, but it also allowed for further play with light, shadow, and overlap for the viewer in the final installation. 

 

After several more iterations of the installation that wrestled with how these boxes would come together to literally occupy an exhibition space, I settled on the installation that eventually came to fruition at the Counterproof printmaking exhibition at RUFA Space, Pastificio Cecere in June of 2024. The boxes would be individually arranged and attached to one another around a central structure (a pedestal) to create a centralized single abstract sculpture object. The boxes, with their corresponding prints attached inside, were organized facing outwards in all directions in an arrangement that considered the viewer experience based on orientation (horizontal or vertical), window placement, and light to create a dynamic and united, but varied, conglomeration of space set against a dark background. A few select prints were attached separate from the main structure lower down on the pedestal, to add more visual variation. I wanted the structure to stand on its own as a unique composition that became more detailed upon further inspection with the realization of the prints, semi-hidden inside. Viewers had to move completely around the structure, ducking and crouching, in order to fully experience each of the rooms. 

 

At the opening of the exhibition, I was happy to find a warm reception to the prints. Classmates and strangers both seemed to enjoy exploring each bedroom. I saw more than one participant bedroom owners searching or sharing the discovery of their space. Some joked about whose room was next to whose and which got prime real estate on the pedestal. I reflected with a few about their rooms which were now long gone, having moved to new apartments in different parts of the city to escape overbearing landlords, intolerable roommates, or long commutes. Many who still found themselves at the same address a year later—including myself—were surprised to see how different the spaces looked to the rooms they lived in currently. Pictures, posters, and art had been hung, furniture bought and rearranged, and an established sense of “lived-in” had now been achieved. Space, as it must do, had continued on through time.