Domestic Departures

An exhibition by artists who have worked together for a number of years as a group, here and in Italy, with artists/teachers Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky (Rosenclaire), and who address, in Domestic Departures, contemporary issues of gender and women's experience of the domestic...Media include ceramic sculpture, installation, prints and painting.

Rosenclaire have been working as a Colab since 1987. Our work is generally context-specific. We join forces in order to creatively facilitate a discourse pertaining to a specific theme, place or situation we are invited to participate in. This may be a curated show such as this, a public sculpture or a pedagogic intervention. The work is done specifically for the conceptual task at hand where, as artists, we regain control and responsibility for generating a specific dialogue with both the art world and general public.  Reflecting on the curatorial theme of “Domestic Departures” in a University gallery in Fullerton LA led us to probe into the concerns around Departures from the Domestic and their implications in relation to art and life.

What is the cultural construct of the domestic and what would be considered a departure?  Same sex couples?  Immigrant families with different cultural and religious practices? Is it the suburban house sheltering the ideal heterosexual family all happily cooking, mending and mowing in domestic bliss? The notion of a fully functional realm in which inflexible, habitual codes of behavior support predetermined, mapped out paths? Or is it possibly a primary locus, of acceptance and understanding of difference. Domestic, is indigenous to our thought, to our respective nations…we produce it and live by it or fight it and depart from it.