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The Laundry Spiral, Bridgehampton,2008

Home Stills is weighted with a heavy silence, a portrayal of domestic womanhood that is both expansive and claustrophobic. Photographer Bastienne Schmidt plays the lone housewife in the series, thoughtfully adrift in common American landscapes. Each ethereal image is full of melancholy, the enormity of their spaces reminiscent of paintings such as Vermeer and Edward Hopper. Here our protagonist wanders a sprawling suburb made poetic in the dwindling afternoon light. The curling pooling of laundry could be seen as circling outward in motherly warmth or drawing her into the earth. Home Stills perpetuates this duality – daydream and reality, love and regret, joy and suffocation – all a perfect unfinished melody floating away in every frame.

via Fraction Magazine

 

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