An immersion into the exquisite tactility of housekeeping finds expression and rebellion in Amanda Rowan’s irresistibly lush short film, Place Setting. Watch the film trailer.
The series was created during the artist's Fellowship at the Women’s International Study Center at Acequia Madre House in Santa Fe. The Place Setting film was selected for the 46th Mill Valley Film Festival; buy tickets here.
Description
Highly performative, Rowan’s work tells timeless stories of domesticity through a cinematic lens. Within the film Place Setting, she plays a solitary housewife who creates and destroys a glamorous 1970s-style dinner party through retro gestures. The film is a sculptural and performance piece that is at once a celebration of matriarchy and the art and flair of the hostess; while simultaneously eluding to collective generational trauma through its deconstruction.
With a reverence for the camp, and unafraid to laugh, Rowan is in on the joke of female representation. She is seducing you to engage with the works because this post-modern Renaissance artist knows sexuality, humor, and beauty in images, ultimately opening up a dialogue to something deeper. The Place Setting film and photographs take the notion of the forgotten and exploited females of the past, and the iconography associated with them, as a way to respond to contemporary mores– asking in what ways is depicting and performing the feminine a constraint and in what ways is it power?