Jenifer K Wofford
Spellchecker
Townhouse Trilogy, 2008
Townhouse Trilogy is 3 videos, 3 drawings and 3 color prints: Spellchecker, Impostor, and Walking With Coffee. It is situated in and around a stylized version of a vintage 1973 Barbie Townhouse, a triple-decker diorama-like dollhouse with fabulously over-the-top trompe l’oeil backdrops. I’ve been interested in how space and interiority function emotionally and psychologically: this project became a way to explore how staged domestic space informs a human, and particularly female, experience.
Top Floor: Spellchecker
Spelling has always had a certain kind of magical precision to me, and “spell” has a double meaning, functioning also as a form of magical incantation. I’m always interested in how language encodes meaning, depending on access. In Spellchecker I spell out significant lines and sentences as actual dialogue, as opposed to mere strings of letters and spaces. It’s a very private, hermetic language that felt right to correlate with a space made to appear like a child’s private domain.
Imposter
Middle Floor: Impostor
Impostor shows a variety of characters, all saying things that indicate varying permutations of impostor phenomenon, a condition fraught with unnecessary self-doubt: it’s a syndrome that many high-achieving women and people of color tend to internalize as a sense that they don’t belong, that they’re under-qualified, frauds, impostors. This piece is situated on the middle floor, in a sort of 70’s purgatory, with foreground and background blurred alternately.
Walking With Coffee
Ground Floor: Walking With Coffee
The ground floor kitchen became the exit point for a piece featuring women obsessively bustling about, clutching cups of coffee to go. It’s both funny and sad how fixated we Americans are about beverages and meals to-go: in reflecting on what seems to facilitate drive and compulsiveness, it felt appropriate to scale the absurdity of this behavior in this video.
Hi Jenifer,
How is this work exhibited? In 3 monitors side-by-side, stacked on top of each other, or projected?
Are the women performing in the spaces a single character or multiple personas? Do they address the viewer directly?
I look forward to learning more about it.
Jillian
I really like the quality of these backdrop drawings. I would love to see the video itself. Is there documentation online anywhere?
The work was exhibited as 3 separate monitors, although in an ideal situation, they would be stacked (with dedicated wireless headphones for each piece).
The women performing in the spaces are different in each piece. In Spellchecker, I’ve thought of the character as a single girl/young woman. In Townhouse, I play a variety of different characters. In Walking with Coffee, I interact with a number of other women (not played by me), so it’s more clearly an ensemble piece.
I haven’t converted/posted the video anywhere: sorry! I may post another, unrelated piece which is online, though.
Jennifer,
I love this work, as I remember coveting a later model of Barbie’s three story town house, mostly decorated in pink and cream.
Have you seen Luarie Simmon’s work a few years ago with the interior decorating book, “Instant Decorator”?
http://www.speronewestwater.com/cgi-bin/iowa/works/record.html?record=1737
Thanks, Nora!
Of course I had the 73 Townhouse as a squirt, so yes, I coveted it, too! Although, funny enough, I was never all that interested in Barbie or playing house: I think even as a child, I was more interested in the weird stage-like performance potential each level had.
Thanks for the link to Laurie Simmons: I hadn’t seen it before!
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