The home is often the perfect stage for domestic bliss and self-observation. The artist Bastienne Schmidt challenges this domestic utopia in her new series Home Stills in which she photographs herself in the role of a ‘Housewife’, giving a visual interpretation of Virginia Woolf‘s idea of ‘A Room of one’s Own’. She follows the Highway 27 on Long Island, from Patchogue to East Hampton, recreating her interiors from cheap motel rooms to upscale Hamptons mansions as imaginary rooms of her own. The sense of quiet meditation reminds one of Vermeer’s interiors and the melancholy and empty spaces of Edward Hopper. Schmidt’s light casts long shadows, dense with color. In this world, the female figure walks seamlessly from open landscape into suburbia. The silhouette-like female character seems to be stepping out of a Wim Wenders movie. Instead of the lone cowboy she is a housewife walking out of the picture into the sunset. A monograph entitled Home Stills was published in 2010 by Jovis with a text by Vicki Goldberg. Home Stills was exhibited in a one person exhibition in 2010 at the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Florida and in 2012 at the Houston Center of Photography in Houston, Texas and at the Manege Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
