GALLERIES: New Domesticity - Reception
New Domesticity
Lois Bielefeld
Presented in alliance with The Laramie Project.
The Emile H. Mathis Gallery
Upper Gallery
Sep 6-Nov 17, 2023
Artist Talk Wed, Oct 18 | 2:20 pm
Reception Wed, Oct 18 | 4-6 pm
In New Domesticity, Bielefeld digs into how home and our roles within them are culturally constructed. Mainstream advertising, television, and movies contribute to the creation of heteronormative ideas about home that Bielefeld actively seeks to disrupt. Bielefeld photographs people from a wide range of identities, while making a point of queering the photographic canon. She spotlights the intentional and deliberate choice of domestic roles within the queer home, and thus draws an explicit contrast to traditional gender-identity formation that is often assumed unthinkingly. She depicts individuals and families, including her own queer family, as they relate to home and domesticity. In so doing, Bielefeld expands on the long history of the private space of the home providing both refuge and safety to people, but especially within queer communities.
The home is a space for potential where our most inner beings are nurtured, developed, examined, and satisfied.
-Lois Bielefeld
Lois Bielefeld is a queer series-based artist working in photography, audio, video, and performance. Currently settled in Milwaukee, Lois has lived on both coasts with a graduate degree from the California Institute of the Arts. Besides photography, they feel passionate about traveling, hiking, eating, and gardening adventures with their wife.
Their work is in the permanent collections of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Saint Kate Arts Hotel, the Warehouse Museum and the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin. Bielefeld has shown at The International Center of Photography in New York City, The National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, de Young Museum in San Francisco, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and Dom Wein in Vienna.