{"id":611,"date":"2020-06-17T22:37:34","date_gmt":"2020-06-17T22:37:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/?p=611"},"modified":"2020-06-17T22:37:34","modified_gmt":"2020-06-17T22:37:34","slug":"confined-space-an-artists-interrogation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/2020\/06\/17\/confined-space-an-artists-interrogation\/","title":{"rendered":"Confined Space: An Artist\u2019s Interrogation"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Lalla Essaydi, Harem, #14C, Chromogenic print on Kodak paper mounted to aluminum
40 x 30 in. , 2009
2017.8. Purchased by Dickinson College Students as part of the Student Purchase Initiative.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Confined. Boxed in. Stuck. Trapped.\u00a0 These are some of the words that I hear friends use these days when they talk about home.\u00a0 Life in quarantine has dramatically shifted how many of us view the spaces we live in.\u00a0 In effect, our homes have become spaces of safety and protection and, by contrast, the spaces outside our home are associated with danger and risk.\u00a0 Somehow knowing this doesn\u2019t seem to help when cabin fever sets in.\u00a0 This past week, as I was pondering how my relationship to our dining room (currently my home office) has shifted over the past couple of months (I step down into it from the kitchen and all the previous days of doing the exact same things in this space play before me in an endless loop; it\u2019s sort of like d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu plus a heavy dose of fatigue), I couldn\u2019t help but think of the work of Lalla Essaydi.\u00a0 She treats a completely different context than that of COVID-19 today, but I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve seen any artist more complexly interrogate the myriad relationships among physical space, culture, and psychological perception.<\/p>\n

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Exhibition Catalog Cover, Lalla Essaydi, The Trout Gallery, Fall 2018-Winter 2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Lalla Essaydi came to campus during The Trout Gallery\u2019s 2018 exhibition of her photographs (CATALOG LINK),<\/a> and to hear her talk about her work is a powerful experience.\u00a0 Here is an excerpt from an interview in which she talks about space:<\/p>\n

\u201cOf particular interest to me is what my photographic work has taught me about the importance of architectural space in Islamic culture. As I indicated earlier, traditionally, the presence of men has defined public spaces: streets, meeting places, places of work. Women have been confined to private spaces, that is, to those of the home. And as I also suggested before, these physical thresholds define cultural ones. Confinement in actual spaces can be the result of transgressing metaphorical boundaries, of crossing into prohibited cultural spaces. Many Arab women today may feel the space of confinement primarily as a psychological one, but its origins lie, I think, in the architecture itself. The women in my photographs are both held with an actual space, and at the same time are confined to their “proper place,” a place of walls and boundaries, a space controlled by men. These women have become literal odalisques (“odalisque,” from the Turkish, means belonging to a place). One has only to look at the continuity between the henna on their bodies and the patterns of the surrounding tiles to see how they have become identified with their surroundings.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Essaydi\u2019s work is based on her own experiences growing up in a harem in Morocco, studying art in France, raising a family is Saudi Arabia, and then coming to the United States as an artist.\u00a0 Islamic artistic traditions, specifically of architectural spaces, but also of textiles and calligraphy, play a crucial role in her consideration of the experiences of Arab women.\u00a0 She views her photographs as but the final step in a performance that begins with the conversations she has with her subjects about their personal lives.\u00a0 These conversations become poetic text that Essaydi applies onto the women\u2019s bodies using henna, a female art form; the shape of the writing resembles traditional Islamic calligraphy, the kind typically associated with the Qur\u2019an.\u00a0 As a child, Essaydi was not permitted to learn this type of calligraphy because she was a girl.\u00a0 The women are then draped with fabrics that Essaydi usually creates to match the patterns and colors of a chosen architectural space.\u00a0 In the image below, from The Trout Gallery collection, you can see the dress that Essaydi made to match the surrounding architecture and if you look in the bottom right corner you will see she even made shoes to match.\u00a0 At times these spaces hold personal meaning from Essaydi\u2019s childhood, at other times they are manufactured spaces, created like sets for a theater performance.\u00a0 Finally, Essaydi photographs the women, at times directing the women and at other times shooting them in poses they request.<\/p>\n

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Detail, Lalla Essaydi, Harem, #14C, Chromogenic print on Kodak paper mounted to aluminum 40 x 30 in. , 2009,
2017.8. Purchased by Dickinson College Students as part of the Student Purchase Initiative.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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The photographs that result from these pieces of performance art are BEAUTIFUL.\u00a0 Like, the kind of beauty that draws disinterested tweens in through The Trout Gallery doors because they caught a glimpse while waiting for their music lessons in our building.\u00a0 In fact, the elaborate ornament and sensuous fabrics common in her photographs are so beautiful that it sometimes takes a while for viewers\u00a0 to process how tightly framed many of her images are.\u00a0 Essaydi\u2019s female figures typically occupy shallow spaces, resplendent in an ornamental beauty that stops just short of obscuring the women at their center.\u00a0 The result is a visual push-pull that lies at the heart of a dialectic about space, how individuals perceive space, and how these experiences are grounded in realities socially constructed and physically felt.<\/p>\n

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Audio Tour Stop, The Trout Gallery, Lalla Essaydi, Harem Revisited #51c<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Essaydi\u2019s meditations on this dynamic are best experienced by viewing specific photographs.\u00a0 To experience a virtual tour of her works, follow along via our tour menu page HERE<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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-Heather Flaherty<\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> Ray Waterhouse, Lalla Essaydi: An Interview<\/em>, Journey of Contemporary African Art, August, 2008, pgs. 144-149.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Confined. Boxed in. Stuck. Trapped.\u00a0 These are some of the words that I hear friends use these days when they talk about home.\u00a0 Life in quarantine has dramatically shifted how many of us view the spaces we live in.\u00a0 In effect, our homes have become spaces of safety and protection and, by contrast, … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4317,"featured_media":613,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[302159,301418,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-educators-desk","category-object-stories","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4317"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/trouttalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}