2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptations
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print this pageDomestic Spaces
Sarah Malakoff
Friday, October 24 - 1:50PM to 2:35PM
Clark Theater
For as long as I can remember, I have had a preoccupation with domestic spaces. In a presentation of my work, I trace my ongoing interest and important artistic influences from Surrealism to Documentary photography. I discuss the interweaving threads in my work including uncanny objects and the psychological impact of particular architectural details. My images of homes contain ordinary and familiar elements. But upon closer inspection, theyare fraught with our longing for a deeper connection to the outside world and an individualʼs unique sense of grandeur and beauty.
I further discuss the ways in which we curate our most intimate spaces to create an environment capable of eliciting responses ranging from relaxation, sophistication, to adventurousness. Our tastes, personalities, quirks and culture are expressed through our dcor choices sometimes intentionally, but often without realizing bits of our most authentic selves have seeped to the surface.
My photographs are a collection of private spaces that ask the viewer to imagine the people who inhabit them. We see both the unique ways we live behind closed doors, as well as the universal impulse to control and transcend our environment. In my images, the home is seen as both a refuge from and at times a re-creation of the outside world. For example, doors and windows can both frame exterior
views and serve to keep the elements at bay. Landscape, weather, and wildlife lurk outside the walls even as they are brought safely inside in the form of pattern, simulation, and domesticated animals. Tensions and humor appear between absence and presence, genuine and artificial, the domestic and the natural worlds.
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Sarah Malakoff
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