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‘Domestic Demise’: Patty Carroll on the Hilarity, Heartbreak, and Horror of the Female Experience cover

‘Domestic Demise’: Patty Carroll on the Hilarity, Heartbreak, and Horror of the Female Experience

Stuffed into a stove, suffocated in thick, mauve velvet, collapsed over a strawberry Jell-O mold. The women in Patty Carroll’s staged photographs are stiff and mannered, posed in unnatural positions that would tempt any onlooker into a murder-mystery whodunnit worthy of Hercule Poirot.

“My photographs are metaphors for the interior lives of women,” writes Patty of her series Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise. “How we substitute everyday objects and artifice and turn them into obsessions.” Jam-packed with hyper-domestic objects—Campbell’s soup cans, retro television sets, Monopoly game pieces—Domestic Demise chronicles the horrific fate of housebound women: literally crushed to death under a heady mixture of societal expectations and condensed chicken noodle soup.

Arranged with cutting precision, Patty Carroll’s staged photographs critique and satirize the social expectations thrust upon women in the domestic sphere.
‘Canned’
Arranged with cutting precision, Patty Carroll’s staged photographs critique and satirize the social expectations thrust upon women in the domestic sphere.
‘Red Wine’

Using a mannequin for each unfortunate woman, Patty arranges her sets with cutting precision, as artificially orchestrated as a Saks window display in December. “I am addressing myths of perfection and illusion by photographically creating worlds that critique and satirize the expectation of domestic perfection; a claustrophobic experience,” says Patty. Blending elements from decorating magazines, traditional still-life paintings, and colorful films from the 1950s and ‘60s, Patty pays homage to women who oversee entire ecosystems—home, family, and career—without thanks.

Comically expired in increasingly creative ways, these women bend and contort to fit their manufactured sets with alarming ease. Girl Scout green fades into avocado-colored curtains. Aggressively patterned loungewear merges with aggressively patterned wallpaper. Pink heels and matching clamdiggers disappear into an oven. Strewn with pink-on-red color palettes, plush fabrics, and quirky lamp sets, Domestic Demise is pure ‘50s and ‘60s camp, design fetishism at the height of object obsession. Placing her photographs in America’s “affluent age,” Patty suggests the irons and ovens advertised as liberators of household drudgery merely made women more docile, more complicit in their own servitude.

“In [Domestic Demise], the figure symbolizes so many women, no matter what culture or background,” Patty says. “However, it has its roots in our traditions of consumer culture and the meaning of ‘things.’” Linking female psychic and spiritual death with the worst impulses of capitalism, Patty throws heavy fabric on the invisible outlines of a gilded cage. “My woman is both the creator and victim of her own possessions and obsessions,” she says. “Her home has become a site of tragedy and danger, with scenes of hilarious and heartbreaking mishaps and horror. While humor is prevalent in these narrative images, the message behind them has darker implications in the role of women in all societies.”


New Book By Katie Love

From Cult To Comedy, A Memoir, by Katie Love

Author Katie Love: The Comedian Turning Heartbreak Into Humor [Podcast] coverThe year is 1970. The horror soap opera “Dark Shadows” is all the rage, the Vietnam War is raging and nine-year-old Katie, an imaginative and independent latch-key kid, comes home from school to discover her mother’s suicide.

Taken in by her older sister who has recently become a Jehovah’s Witness, Katie is shown an illustration from a bible picture book featuring wild animals peacefully lounging by a pool of water, surrounded by happy people picking fruit. An enticing offer is made: “Katie, this is Paradise. Do you want to see Mom again, happy and living forever? All you have to do is follow all of Jehovah’s commandments and you can be with Mom again.”

Mom happy and living forever? Two tickets to Paradise, please!

So begins Katie’s zealous quest to attain perfection and entrance into a utopian world which promises peace, love, and happiness. She discovers a much darker world. “Two Tickets to Paradise, from Cult to Comedy” tells the hilarious and heartbreaking story of an earnest, bible-toting kid intent on saving the world, and follows her metamorphosis into a boisterous comedian intent on saving herself through the healing powers of humor.

 

My photographs are metaphors for the interior lives of women.” — Patty Carroll

Arranged with cutting precision, Patty Carroll’s staged photographs critique and satirize the social expectations thrust upon women in the domestic sphere.
‘Blues’
Arranged with cutting precision, Patty Carroll’s staged photographs critique and satirize the social expectations thrust upon women in the domestic sphere.
‘Cooking the Goose’
‘Mad Mauve’
Arranged with cutting precision, Patty Carroll’s staged photographs critique and satirize the social expectations thrust upon women in the domestic sphere.
‘Games’
‘Money Honey’
‘Panther’
‘Postal’
‘Scrapbooking’
‘Trophy Wife’
‘Sick and Tired’
‘Staired Down’
‘Striped Books’
‘Jell-O’

Patty Carroll: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Purchase Work

All photos published with permission of the artist(s).

Want to be featured on NOT REAL ART? Email editor@notrealart.com with a short introduction and a link to your online portfolio or three images of your work.

Morgan  Laurens 

Morgan Laurens (she/her/hers) is NOT REAL ART’s editor in chief. Morgan is an arts writer from the Midwest who enjoys saying “excuse me” when no actual pardon is needed. She specializes in grant writing and narrative-based storytelling for mission-driven artists and arts organizations. With a background in printmaking, pop culture, and classic literature, Morgan believes a girl’s best friend is the pile of books on her bedside table.

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