A Wife: An Installation
Maggie Miller’s multilayered A Wife: An Installation was contained inside the renovated garage that serves as a gallery for this alternative space. The setting perfectly bracketed what is essentially a critique of wife-dom within a setting normally constructed as massculine. This physical and psychological duality mirrors the type of role confusion Miller is intent on exposing. The garage structure, coated in layers of crimson paint and inlaid with meticulously constructed vitrines, took on both the gravitas and implied seduction of a Victorian novella. The transformed chamber housed several bronzed relics and a video montage that merged the horrific with Hollywood slapstick in the pursuit of deconstructing domesticity.
Miller understands that her project is, in a sense, impossible. The position she presents accomadates both repulsion and attraction to the label “wife” and the larger implications of homemaking. While Miller bludgeons a fictitious husband (played by her real-life partner) with a rolling pin in the darkly comic video A Wife, she is equally drawn to decorate the walls with velvet-lined cases. These tastefully display the relics of a succinct history of the politics of reproduction: a bronzed foxglove flower represents a resort to magic and herbology as an attempt to gain control over reproductive functions, while a simililarly bronzed early pregnancy test suggests an equally speculative belief in the truth of science. That both objects are tied within medical systems that are usually obscured is emphazized by museological labeling in Latin, and their ostentatious presentation.
Domestic issues cross economic boundaries and are perhaps most silenced and repressed within the middle class. When a wife is not compelled by immediate financial urgency to work outside the home, her labor is frequently focused on the home and is oftened fractured and compulsive. This idea is mirrored by Miller’s grocery list, writ large on the bright red walls of the space. The even, calligraphic hand lists gourmet ingredients – products consumed by leisure classes – suggesting that the reistance to deconstruction of the term “wife” lies partly in its continued bourgeois appeal. Miller understands that language is a crucialcomponent of this system: small, mirrored works hung on the walls of the installation depict needles, suggesting the first “prick” of language recognition described by psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, an influential presence in Miller’s working process.
Miller has been attempting to formulate new strategies for nurturing beyond the confines of partnership and motherhood for some time. An ongoing project involves the regular production and subsequent mailing of small, often edible gifts to what is now a large group of recipients throughout Los Angeles. This gesture is in part a response to the claustrophobia made visual in “A Wife,” and also an element in her investigation of the relative validity or redundancy of socially constructed roles. All four videos shown as part of the installation – Soup is Good Food, Passion 1, A Wife, Passion 2, contain linking elements but leave conclusions open for a possible next installment. In a similar fashion, visual cues in the form of small gilded droplets lead the viewer beyond the confines of the installation, through an overgrown pathway toa somewhat hidden chamber set into the exterior wall. Here Miller has installed her pristine but portentous chosen instrument of redemption: a rolling pin.
Review written by Jacqueline Cooper