Colonial aesthetics, obscenity trials, hysterical masculinity, crime scene photography, sexology, the production of the lesbian throughout modernity and the contemporary collapse of post-war social housing projects, all intersect in a critical queer-working class reading of architectural and design modernism. Working through acts of displacement Domestic Optimism is a performative exhibition intent on fucking with historical legacy through distinctly vernacular language and aesthetics. The project documents and enacts forms of inscription, temporal displacements, slippages from a ‘sapphic’ modernity onto the surfaces of contemporary queer, working class homes and bodies. The Irish-born self-taught modernist architect/designer Eileen Gray is an important figure in the projects research, not as a singular heroic modernist fit for canonisation but as a collectively involved queer woman, part of an extended peer group of dykey women makers in Paris throughout the early twentieth century. With the current decline in historical thinking, shifts in historical narrating are necessary in putting the past to work in the turbulent present.
The first chapter of the exhibition Domestic Optimism. Act One: Modernism - A Lesbian Love Story is presented at Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria between 24 September – 20 November 2020.
