BOXED IN

BOXED IN is a response to confinement. It’s terrible to realize how badly – as a white American woman in her late 60’s - I’ve failed the moral ideal I was brought up to believe in. And to know that any attempts to redress are restricted to the reductive world of social media where, as a complex individual with nuanced perspective, I’ve become the unwanted subtext to more accessible sound bites. The three spaces represent my ‘de-formation’. The attic is filled with the literary fictions from my youth that formed my idealism but also biased the way I engaged with other cultures and points of view. The basement represents a career spent in countries where I’m no longer allowed to work and travel. The central space is my present, an Echeresque stage that confuses performance with personality, where people have become one-dimensional images- the victims of our out-sized movie and media representations. Confinement has clarified for me that the three spaces are bound together and inseparable. Do we ever travel very far from where we started? Is the acquisition of experience an illusion? I now live with one foot in the wanna-be world to which I aspired, and the other in the wartier realities of a restricted life. BOXED IN is wall hung and intended to be viewed only from the front, like 2D artwork. (hence the single image submission) It is a stage set, the last of 4 sets used in the production of a 10-minute animation titled ‘What DID Happen to Alice?’ opening in September at the Nohra Haime Gallery in NYC. Excerpts can be viewed on my website https://valeriehird.com, or #Don’tAskAliceVideo, and Facebook.