Ciara Finnegan / The Dollhouse Space
Michael Snow, Michael Snow, Michael Snow.
Digital Video Still
2019
Challenging accepted notions of professional practice, The Living Room in The Living Room: Preparatory Studies I-XII is a series of short films produced over 6 months. Part research, part experiment, part homage to Michael Snow’s work & part physical enactment of a family dynamic, performed by members of The Dollhouse Space
Established in 2018 to address a lack of professional critical possibilities for artists who are primary carers, The Dollhouse Space is a bi-locational, experimental, non-profit art space with a tiny physical presence in North Holland and a (theoretically) infinitely expandable space online at www.thedollhouse.space.
Taking cues from E.F. Schumacher’s appeal to humanise scale in his seminal essay collection, ‘Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered’ (1973), The Dollhouse Space, by virtue of its size and hybridity, promotes a new environmentally and economically sustainable model of art practice. Testing the role of scale, value, materiality and virtual worth in the art world today, it explores the potential of alternative curatorial and institutional models, rethinking many aspects of exhibition and artistic residency practices to provide sustainable alternatives that maximise creative potential and artistic exchange while minimising the use of finite material resources. It also muses upon the problem of Collections, maintaining an unstable archive and challenging human exceptionalism by promoting the recycling of artworks as other artworks. The physical Dollhouse is an instance of a product line produced by the Dutch toy manufacturer Okkerse in 1974.
Representing a demographic with young dependents and/or caring for an ailing, elderly parent or relative (the latter a subset that will only grow in number), the Dollhouse Space believes that our professional art institutions/galleries/museums must work harder to accommodate the demands of artists in this group (women artists in particular) by building compassion into their very design. As a project, it recognises and attempts to address this need by re-examining value in terms of both time and physical scales and virtual/physical states, and by proposing a different definition of what constitutes a ‘professional practice’.
