Rachel Pimm, Portfolio, AF Project Space, 2012
Rachel Pimm, Portfolio, AF Project Space, 2012
Rachel Pimm, still from video, Ideal Slumber Party, 2012
In artist Rachel Pimm’s work domestic life is always a performance, and architecture is a stage-set. From sleepovers in The Ideal Home Show to infomercials for Auto Italia LIVE’s TV project (an artist run space she also co-founded, and lived within), Rachel's work explores the slippery status of live-work spaces, and the intersection between the fantasies and functions of interior design and the trade secrets of marketing these to the masses.
For Three Little World’s abstracted hotel of ‘super-furniture’, Rachel moved in to become the exhibition’s tenant, using the Tower of Babel as a counterpoint to the installation in an exploration of the mutable meanings, lifestyles and characters architectural environments can prompt and frame. One outcome was a public performance demonstrating an acting technique taught by Sanford Meisner, in which repetitive dialogue aims to find ways for actors to ‘live truthfully under a given set of imaginary circumstances.’
For Rachel, inhabiting a space only appearing to be functional helps reveal and celebrate the artifice inherent in the display of all forms of domesticity, demonstrating the mimesis with which consumers become a product of the architecture they inhabit. Her residency in Bureau Spectacular’s installation adds to this cumulative live-work project – titled Portfolio both in terms of occupied real estate and the production of an artistic practice.
Portfolio is collated cumulatively online at www.live-work-portfolio.org. On the website real-world locations that Rachel has temporarily inhabited are rendered in google sketch-up and left floating autonomously like a virtual campsite of non-homes. During the residency, the website-in-progress was projected in the gallery space, where it could be viewed from an environment where the home comforts needed to inhabit the installation are left visible each morning, leaving a residue of temporary occupation for the viewer to in turn inhabit.
Portfolio was made in collaboration with Jean-Francois Goyette, who joined Rachel overnight on Wednesday 22nd August to launch the website.
Rachel Pimm (b.1984) lives and works in London. She has a BA from Central St. Martins and is currently studying towards an MFA at Goldsmiths.