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Indepth Arts News:
"Domestic Archaeology: Site/Insite an Installation by Edythe F. Wright"
2001-04-04 until 2001-04-21
Mobius
Boston, MA,
USA
My name is Edythe F. Wright. I've lived in Boston for about three years. When I was a child, I first wanted to be an
espionage agent when I grew up. After a number of years, I decided that I would be a surgeon and sculptor instead.
I took every class in high school that related in any way to medicine, but my desire to be a doctor was sharply at
odds with my math and chemistry grades. I went to art school to pursue the other half of the dream, and I have
subsequently found that as an artist I can wear all of the hats I choose to as I make my work.
In my project, Domestic Archaeology: Site/Insite, I work as a spy, surgeon, archaeologist, painter, display
technician, graphic designer, writer and sculptor. Part of an ongoing project of urban archaeology, the exhibition at
Mobius will be comprised of the display of documents, drawings, paintings and other information about artifacts
removed from a working-class residence in Boston. The artifacts, (over-stuffed chair, clock, radio, Wonderbra®,
toaster, vacuum cleaner, etc.) have been dissected into their various parts, catalogued, indexed, and referenced in a
manner that [speaks] of practices from the museum and laboratory. Each object and its multiple fragments are
placed and used . . . as a touchstone for memory and history and are thus infused with emblematic and allegorical
functions. Here, memory is the vestige of the individual embodied in, or detonated by, the fragments. The text
accompanying the artifact displays create nuanced narratives of the lives of the . . . characters who owned the
objects and live[d] in the house and structures the absent yet powerfully palpable presence of the . . . individuals.
Although I am in fact doing the work of the archaeologist, anthropologist and ethnographer in this Domestic
Archaeology project, it is all a fiction and a fabrication. The documents, artifact displays and text are meant to
function as an allegory of memory. It is only through the meta-scientific rigor of my investigations and the formal
and institutional techniques of display that I attempt to endow the work with an aura of verisimilitude.
Edythe F. Wright
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