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Image credit: A. Latina Brown, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Edith Farnsworth House. Mies van der Rohe. 1945-1951

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Image credit: By Lessismore2020 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95273386

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German Pavilion, Barcelona. Mies van der Rohe. 1929

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German Pavilion, Barcelona. Mies van der Rohe.
Sculpture 'Alba' Georg Kolbe
Image source: https://www.ribapix.com/German-Pavilion-Barcelona-courtyard-with-sculpture-Alba-by-Georg-Kolbe_RIBA4832

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Sight gags & chunky Madonnas (butts and boobs)

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Sight gags & chunky Madonnas (butts and boobs)

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I love Tati's gag from Trafic, where, what appear to be a woman's enormous breasts turn out to be her baby's bottom. To my amusement, this also brought to mind Massacio's Madonna & Child. Somewhere in between Massacio and the actress who is the subject of the gag, lies my chunky Madonna.

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Sight gags: Woman & Child, Trafic, Jacques Tati, 70mm film, 1972

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Post-production slapstick treatment. Corpus Callosum. digital film transferred to 16mm, Michael Snow. 2002.

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Massacio - Madonna and Child with Angels
1426 Egg Tempera on panel.

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Buster Keaton   The Electric House 1922   Moving Stairs

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Charlie Keeps Falling from Stairs   One A M  1916   Charlie Chaplin

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A man is splatted up against a wall in a bedroom. He is red from head to toe. You can see this. The house is transparent. A woman, who looks like a table, rests in the adjacent bedroom. She is blueish. There may be a dog or two of indeterminate colour and breed.

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A man is splatted up against a wall in a bedroom. He is red from head to toe. You can see this. The house is transparent. A woman, who looks like a table, rests in the adjacent bedroom. She is blueish. There may be a dog or two of indeterminate colour and breed.

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For you, David, a pipe: the stove in Nelson Mandela's House in Soweto against which rests the bin lid used as a shield by Winnie Mandela on an occasion the family came under attack. Also this sign:

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Hi Anne-Marie, some of the most exciting plants we came across in South Africa were pretty ferocious. Deadly, in fact. And so I brought you back a sample two of our favourites: The Devil's Tomato and The Sausage Fruit Tree. (lethal in so many creative ways!)

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Transparent plexiglass was the material du jour in 2020...

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The Living Room (Michael Snow) - film still

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The Living Room (Michael Snow) - film still

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Designed & produced as daily episodes during the first lockdown in The Netherlands (beginning March 2020)
The characters from Snow's film, reinterpreted by live 'actors' in the Preparatory Studies, feature here as plasticine models. Reluctant to lend them another dimension of character by adding voice to the animated models, with reference to graphic comics, they speak in speech balloons. With exaggerated attention on the mundane, the contrived sense of Event of the non-event, the characters make frequent reference to Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" - most especially to the character of Lucky in the play.

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A Theatre of Confinement. Omnibus. Acts 1, 2 & 3 (episodes 1-16)

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When restrictive Covid-19 regulations forced the BBC to announce a moratorium on filming their regular soaps I felt compelled to address this imminent lack. So, during the strict lockdown period in The Netherlands, in between home-school sessions, I made a mini-mini existential soap-opera in three acts called: A Theatre of Confinement. It is performed by members of The Plasticast, who made their debut in the Michael Snow/The Dollhouse Space production The Living Room Twice Nested. 
  
Manipulation of the figures is explicit - there’s no attempt at ‘sleight of hand’ - quite the opposite, in fact. A hand very obviously guides their movements. I also made no attempt to rebuild or repair the figures as the time wore on, so they visibly disintegrate on screen over the lockdown period.
 
Act 1 opens with the buoyancy of novelty - the minor actions are not yet old, not yet weary and there's a dark gaiety about handwashing to two verses of 'Happy Birthday' (the handwashing theme-tune recommended by global national health ministries). However, toward the second half of Act 1 things start to unravel as tedium sets in and the characters begin to encounter artworks from previous DHS exhibitions. 
 
Act 2 segues into something rather more desperate: in scene 1, the characters invoke Julian of Norwich (set against a recording of my eldest son playing Saint Saen's “Danse Macabre” on violin with my daughters fighting in the background) but seem to take little comfort in her words. They iterate a variation of this in the final scene of Act 2 on the balcony (a reference to the Italian Covid balcony singing). In scene 2, the Man recites an excerpt from Beckett’s ‘Footfalls’ which the Woman performs, until she can’t take it anymore. 
 
Act 3 sees a restoration of calm. Or perhaps it is that, post-manic phase, the cast has sunk into a state of ennui… In the opening scene of Act 3 (episode 13) they attempt what Beckett does so skilfully in his work - the ambiguous statement that is comment on both the microcosmic and macrocosmic situation. This scene concludes with the Woman’s rhetorical question: “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” - referring both to their sense of humour (they are reduced to laughing at their own jokes) and that day’s report on the global Pandemic situation. 
 
Act 3 experiments with a guest script-writer who also remotely directs the third scene of this act. The guest is Andrew Demetrius, the artist who occupied The Living Room of The Dollhouse Space during the period The DollHAUS. I’ve always been interested in testing ideas of artistic ownership and signature and Andrew’s script presented me with an interesting challenge and physically pushed the Plasticast to their elastic limits.

Concept & execution by Ciara Finnegan.
Ciara Finnegan is a visual artist and director of www.thedollhouse.space. She is based in The Netherlands.

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Extract from 'Make 'em Laugh' ('Singing in The Rain' 1952)

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60 seconds · Clipped by The Dollhouse · Original video “1080p HD “Make ‘Em Laugh” ~ Singin’ in the Rain (1952)” by ozabbavo77

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The Living Room in The Living Room - Preparatory Studies I-X + Bre[a]k[h]ages

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The Living Room in The Living Room - Preparatory Studies I-X + Bre[a]k[h]ages

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Michael Snow's "The Living Room" (2000, digital video transferred to 16mm film) continues to hold me in its thrall. I plan to continue to play in response to this in The Plexiglass Dollhouse; exploring the violence of slapstick, exaggerated character distortion and identity ambiguity in some kind of transparent and semi-transparent media.

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The Living Room in The Living Room - Preparatory Studies I-X + Bre[a]k[h]ages

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For a period of 3 months, together with my family (who appear frequently in my work under the moniker “The Dollhouse Staff”) we lived out variations on the theme of Michael Snow’s film, ‘The Living Room’ ( 2000 16mm). 

The Living Room: Preparatory Studies I-X + Bre[a]k[h]ages' issued from my research and intimate engagement with Snow’s film. Revelling in elements of slapstick comedy, the series is part homage to Snow's work, part research, part experiment, part physical enactment of a family dynamic and, finding slapstick an effective antidote to excesses of self-interest, pokes fun at contemporary notions of personal entitlement and self-importance.

Biographical information:
Ciara Finnegan is a visual artist from Northern Ireland. She lives and works in the Netherlands.  She is the director of The Dollhouse Space - an experimental, bi-locational contemporary art space with a virtual presence here: www.thedollhouse.space and a physical presence in North Holland.