Curtains, Live Better Electrically
Photographic triptych printed with archival inkjet pigment on paper, then fractally burned with electricity, allowing electrical current to physically alter and scar the photographic surface.
Electrically
Dimensions vary, 2022, Archival Inkjet Prints with Electric Fractal Burns, No Editions
A bronze medallion, embedded in the brick next to the front door of our 1960s house, is emblazoned with the charge to “Live Better Electrically.” The medallion was part of one of the most successful postwar mass marketing home advertising campaigns in US history by General Electric and Westinghouse.
We have spent more than twenty years living in this house, raising a family and accumulating thousands of photographs of our life together. For this project, we returned to this archive looking for photographs that carried an overwhelmingly strong emotional presence or energy. We then cropped away the event itself, leaving behind seemingly ordinary fragments: a cloud, the drapes in our bedroom, kitchen cabinet doors, grass, a hand. What remains are peripheral details from photographs of celebrations, losses, and everyday family life. Removed from their original narratives, these fragments become charged containers for memories that are no longer completely visible.
After a tumultuous couple of years, we want to live better too, and reconnect. Through a dynamic and dangerous process of destruction and renewal, we print these photographs at large scales and translate electricity into a system of abstract visual language. We draw directly with electricity in an unpredictable method that creates one of a kind works as the electrical current burns, scars, and fuses with the photographic image.
By using Lichtenberg burning, also known as fractal burning, to discharge electricity through our artwork, we give a nod to the Surrealists’ process of “automatic drawing.” Fractal burning takes its name from German experimental physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, 1742 to 1799, who also authored The Waste Books. The performative burning technique requires a unique collaboration between us and two points of electricity, resulting in beautiful fractals of charred deposits created by electrical currents.
This work is about memories, home, histories, and a fusing of science and art.
Gold Medallion, Live Better Electrically
Photograph of an original Gold Medallion emblem from the Live Better Electrically campaign, a symbol used to identify homes designed around the promise of a fully electrified American domestic life.
Live Better Electrically Medallion Campaign Advertisement, c. 1950s
Promotional advertisement for the Live Better Electrically Medallion Home program, presenting the fully electrified house as a model for modern American domestic life, convenience, progress, and family prosperity.
