Nadine Boughton: “American Home”
3 December 2015-23 January 2016
“American Home” takes a long look at mid-century America, a culture where men returned home from war, mass consumption and advertising proliferated, and gender roles were set in stone. Women as homemakers created an attitude of “everything is fine,” while men wore executive suits, or dripped with sweat in confronting danger. Boughton’s collages use imagery from vintage materials to explore the psychology, politics and polarities of the period.
“American Home” presents work from two series: “True Adventures in Better Homes” shows the underbelly of anxiety in the age of McCarthyims with collaged collissions between 1950s men’s adventure magazines (a.k.a. “sweats”) and the cool, orderly homes depicted in women’s magazines of the same era. “Fortune and the Feminine” focuses on gender polarities. Advertisements in Fortune magazine depicted (and still do) men’s world of wealth, industry and big ideas. Women’s magazines centered on the home with all its flowing fabrics, sensuality and a dreamy interiority. Boughton’s intention is to deconstruct these images of mid-century advertising, creating narratives of ambiguity with humour and a dark edge. The narratives explore the different relationships men and women have to power, beauty and longing.
Boughton’s interest is to create what collage does best — presenting the pulsing tension between opposites. “American Home” presents the borderland between interior and exterior spaces, wildness and domesticity, order and chaos, archetype and cliché, and the worlds of men and women.
INFORMATION
United Photo Industries Gallery
Suite B
16 Main Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201 USA
(718) 801-8099
Hours:
Tuesday-Saturday, 11AM-6PM
Image:
Wingtips
by Nadine Boughton
15″x15″
archival pigment print
2015
courtesy of the artist