The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs
See additional images and read a poem from the exhibition in this feature on At Length.
A collaborative, multimedia installation by Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer and Cheryl Wassenaar. The work explores the bureaucracy of the mind, imagining a group of government officials who preside over specific functions of the psyche. The installation is based on a series of Schlaifer’s poems that manifest this idea through the interior cabinets of Self-Preservation, Desire, Lesser Offenses, Confrontations, Retribution, Misgivings, and many others.
Merging sculpture, sound, video, text, and design, the installation centered around the cubicles of three cabinet ministers: Indulgences, Reason, and Unconsciousness. Each office was outfitted with materials and media specific to their occupant, from the paper-stuffed office of Reason to the obsessive collection of specimens in Unconsciousness to the cassette tapes, Polaroids, and surveillance equipment—dripping with glycerin soap—in the office of Indulgences. Text from the poems streamed across the wall in cut vinyl lettering, and unspooled across the floor on printed red tubing in front of the Archives of the Interior—a 30-foot wall of cast-sugar objects. Glitchy videos from the Press Secretary of the Interior and the Curator of the Interior broadcast throughout the space to create a kind of echo chamber, where the personal becomes the political and the political becomes the personal. In the gallery’s black box, a hybrid sound-video piece enveloped the viewer in crashing waves and voices. Executed in a restricted color palette of black, white, and red, the combined elements create an explorable mind-space of bureaucratic grey matter.
This is Schlaifer & Wassenaar’s third collaboration, and they were among a select group of artists to receive an Artistic Innovations grant from the Mid-America Arts Alliance to support the exhibition and programming.
Learn more about the exhibition in this article by Liam Otten.
Installation view. At front, the Waiting Room of the Interior. Materials include cut vinyl lettering (on walls), stacks of newspapers, painted office furniture, coffee table with embedded video broadcast from the Press Secretary of the Interior. Image by Richard Sprengeler.
The Chamber of Chronicles. Materials include approx. 300 cast sugar blocks, printed with objects by direct impression, painted aluminum angle, red tubing printed with “Is anything not messaging?” in industrial block lettering. Image by Stephanie Schlaifer.
Installation detail: The Office of the Minister of the Cabinet of Unconsciousness. Materials include found animal and plant specimens, video + sound element, fabricated mud dauber nests, wooden cubicle. Image by Richard Sprengeler.
Cleavemark Drive
A collaborative installation by Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer & Cheryl Wassenaar at the Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts, 2014, that works with poems from Schlaifer’s collection Cleavemark (BOAAT Press, 2016).
The poems explore a familial loss through the architecture of domestic spaces.
Cleavemark Dr., text installation (“When the Eye Saw It Appeared”) + bedframe w/ egg-stained teacups + conduit. (Image courtesy of David Johnson)
Cleavemark Dr., text installation (“Everything You Want to Know About Dishes”) + pickling salt-encrusted La-Z-Boy w/diorama. (Image courtesy of Jessica Baran)
Cleavemark Dr., closet installation: soap-embedded wooden spools w/ golden thread and needles + custom embroidery. (Image courtesy of David Johnson)
Cleavemark Dr., three dioramas: wolf w/ forest chest, bare pines w/ blue glass grave, wolf girl; cast sugar boxes, clay, fur, glass, rose twigs.
Pickled Switchplates
Cleavemark Dr., installation overview. (Image courtesy of David Johnson)
Cleavemark Dr., cabinet style installation: salvaged hi-fi + cast sugar cakes + “sugar cubes,” cast sugar blocks w/ object impressions (stamps, iron, juicer).
Cleavemark Dr., sugar-coated installation: sugared basins w/ cast sugar bags + sugar-coated kitchenware + “sugar prints” (on floor): “THERE IS A CONTAINER ABOUT THE SIZE OF ME.”
Cleavemark Dr., text installation (“Upwards”) + pickling salt-encrusted switch plate installation.
Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer 