2015

Photographs, carpet, vinyl baseboard, audio collage

Staycation consists of references to the generic office environment, the stay-at-home vacation, and the ubiquitous pop-up ad. While the photographic works draw attention to the beach resort as a pervasive vacation destination, they also call into question formulations of introspection and self-care that have been emptied of substance and reduced to a consumer product—the desktop-Zen-garden. Positioned within a space transformed by short-pile carpet (complete with vinyl baseboards), the Staycation photographs mark the performance of their construction, the role of photography as memory, and photography’s technical operation as indexical. Additionally, the photographic and carpet installation is punctuated by a soundscape that vacillates between dream-machine tones and an increasingly bizarre request to fill out an online survey regarding information privacy and identity theft. Taken together, the components of Staycation offer a farcical examination of the nature of office culture, the vacation as escape, and the milieu of online experience, which tends to be dominated by advertisement and marketing ploys.