Older Work
Performance Installation 2016
Room 406 | DFBRL8R at stARTup Art Fair
Mile North Hotel
Chicago, IL
Duration: 10hrs
A hotel room comes together as a neutral arrangement of furnishings, conveniences, functional materials, utilitarian objects, and disavowed labor, that together, offers hotel guests a semblance of domestic comfort without the responsibility of creating or maintaining its interiors. They are spaces that offer its guests an escape from such considerations for the duration between check-in and check-out and for a standard rate.
A hotel room’s amenities - from king-sized beds to mini-fridges and ironing boards - are unremarkable and rarely perceived beyond their utility. What happens when the silent (invisible?) mis-en-scene of a standard hotel room is liberated from its function?
STANDARD AMENITIES is a three-part performance that references the operational practices of the hospitality industry in order to unpack the materiality that renders a hotel room present as a hotel room. Part 1 (Turn Down) is an accumulation of quiet interventions and rearrangements of the room’s things, unsettling its neutrality. Part 2 (DND) is a durational installation of the body as an object at rest, its automatic and unconscious movements enacting the choreography of sleep. In Part 3 (Housekeeping) all materials, objects, and furnishings are restored to their proper place and their function is reestablished, resetting the room into a ‘neutral’ space awaiting its next guest.