Home is the ultimate escape from the pressures of daily life, a private getaway where we can unwind and be our true selves. But it’s not always that simple. At a time when people are practicing social isolation in a Sisyphean attempt to stanch the exponential spread of COVID-19 across the United States, homes have been transformed into offices, schools, restaurants, and gyms — spaces that are constricting, even claustrophobic, in their limitations.
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In challenging times, humor can be the best medicine. A little levity goes a long way when the weight of the world sends us climbing the walls. In the world of American photographer Patty Carroll those walls bite back is a series of Baroque horrors taken from the on-going series, “Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise.” Her exhibition, Collapse and Calamity, presents delightfully decadent scenes of death that come about in an ill-fated quest to create the “perfect home.”
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Inspired in part by the board game “Clue,” Carroll crafts melodramatic moments of domesticity gone awry. Every corner of the home becomes suspect, the setting for a disaster so luxurious it’s hard to do anything but laugh. Nestled deep in the desire for an opulent oasis are the very seeds of demise. “The perfect home is a blessing, a joy, and a burden that you want to have this thing and it’s never going to be perfect but you keep trying,” says Carroll, who came of age in the 1950s and ‘60s, at a time when the consumerist lifestyle was being perfectly crystallized.
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“Mid-century design is almost mythical in its idea about perfection. It was a time of hope. It all happened after the big war and everyone was becoming prosperous. It was a magical, glamorous time. People dressed up for dinner in their perfect homes where the drapes matched the wallpaper and the sofa. My mother’s house was never that good; it wasn’t even close. Later on you tell yourself, ‘I’m going to give myself the perfect life I never had.’”
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