Erica Bailey

Above the Clouds is part of a series in which I recreate, in miniature, studios where I have worked temporarily. This diorama represents my RAiR Foundation studio and was commissioned for the permanent collection of the Anderson Museum, Roswell, NM. The video that creates the view through the diorama windows was taken during various flights to and from Roswell.

Outstare the Stars pairs a diorama of a prehistoric cave dwelling with that of a future dwelling on Mars, evoking the scale of all human existence and the vaster cosmic scale in which it unfolds. The “found-architecture” of the cave is open, exposed to the elements of Earth, while the Martian dwelling is encapsulated, sealed off from the Martian atmosphere. Together they suggest two distinct modes of being in the world and present related dichotomies of order/chaos, vulnerability/ safety. While both exhibit a feeling of isolation and smallness within the context of limitless time and space, they also evince the boldness of humankind in asserting itself, seeking to not only survive but to thrive.

Multimedia installation, dimensions variable, 2019

So Close is an installation developed for Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, operated by Artists Alliance, Inc. The installation includes a miniature diorama of the studios comprising the LES Studio Program, a program of AAI, where the artist was a resident from June 1 through September 14, 2018. The diorama is paired with found video, taken at the microscopic level, of bacteria decomposing animal cells and video the artist took in the LES studios of a dead mouse under the radiator, discovered while seeking unusual vantage points from which to shoot the space.

The diorama reduces the studio space, crystallizing it into a still vessel much like the mouse carcass. In doing so, it removes the viewer from the space, placing them outside looking in. Meanwhile, the video of the dead mouse transports the viewer down into the space to view the neglected scene of demise. It suggests an embodied eye moving along the baseboard and magnifies what is seen there to a human scale through the use of projection. Video displayed on a monitor positioned behind the windows of the diorama creates an unexpected, otherworldly exterior to the studio. Unfolding outside of the windows, at a scale imperceptible to the naked eye, is the frantic activity of organisms that when magnified creates visuals that are mesmerizing.

The diorama is the artist’s attempt to halt time, at once a denial of impermanence and a memento mori. It presents the studio emptied of both art and the implements of artmaking suggesting both the potential for creation and an anxiety akin to that which a writer feels when confronted with the blank page. The alternating acts of closing in on and pulling back that occur in the installation express a longing to get at, through the creative act, something elusive about our existence within various and bewildering scales of time and space.

Multimedia installation, 8' x 17' x 4', 2017

Multimedia Installation for Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, New York

11' x 20' x 37' (3.4m x 6m x 11.3m)

2015

By choosing to represent spaces relative to my personal experience this project marks a more explicitly personal exploration of built space and its social and psychological underpinnings than my past projects. I have selected two intimate spaces of dwelling—one of adolescence, my bedroom in the house in which I grew up in Shiloh, Ohio, a space of memory and of distance, remote both in terms of time and space, and the other, the studio apartment in Harlem in which I lived upon first moving to New York in January of 2012, a space I only recently left. These lived-in, slept-in, dreamt-in, and awakened-in spaces are contrasted with a representation of the Smack Mellon gallery space, a public space, only casually known to me, but significant as the place of presentation in which the two private spaces are given to the public.

All of the spaces are represented empty—suggesting a time before or after the living, sleeping, dreaming, awaking, or presenting occurs. This sense of transience is heightened by the continual shifting of location that plays out in the video, and along with the peculiar orientation of each of the dioramas, it acts to subvert spatial expectations. Each location—Harlem, Shiloh, and DUMBO—only intermittently accompanies its pertinent interior. The 1/12 scale of the dioramas, a common dollhouse scale, allows for the disparate spaces to be experienced in a proximity not otherwise possible, revealing how the Smack Mellon exhibition space, originally a boiler house supplying heat and power to nearby properties, dwarfs the two domestic interiors.

The structure itself is at once a contrivance for lifting the floor (thereby making possible the recessing of the dioramas) and an ode to both the concept of “room” and to the act of “building”. With its framing exposed, it exists as naked evidence of its own construction. Meanwhile, its skeletal appearance is suggestive of the body evoked in the quote from which I have taken the title of the piece. In the quote, from Lydia Davis’s translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, it is the body that is engaged in the act of remembering a space: “Its memory, the memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulders, offered in succession several of the rooms where it had slept, while around it the invisible walls, changing place according to the shape of the imagined room, spun through the shadows.” The three rooms of the structure, yet to take full form, are suspended in the indeterminate zone that is both a room and a blank space. Like a conventional gallery space in that respect, each room serves as an intimate gallery for the diorama it contains.

Multimedia Installation for the UnMuseum, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio

11' x 10' x 28' (3.4m x 3m x 8.5m)

2010-2013

This installation consists of a three room, gunshot style house, in which each consecutive room decreases in scale. The third room houses a diorama with a video component that functions to create the view beyond the windows in the diorama, and as such, re-establishes the the location of the house from its actual context in the gallery to various neighborhoods around Cincinnati. The video zooms in and out of locations, alternating between residential, working-class neighborhoods and the downtown cultural and economic center of the city. The house acts a a subject moving between center and periphery, telescoping in and out, restless and unsettled

Multimedia installation

24' x 20' x 9' (7.3m x 6.1m x 2.75m)

2010

This project explores new home construction of the pre-packaged, low-end model home type. The installation feels cold and empty, highlighting the irony of advertising campaigns like the one from which the title is taken that promise warmth and security in a housing market that is volatile and, to many, inaccessible. The installation consists of a partial new construction home built into the gallery space, a 1/12 scale diorama of a new home under construction, and a slide show of images taken at a housing development site in the d

ead of winter.

Multimedia installation for Blue Sky Project, McHenry County, Illinois (now located in Dayton, Ohio)

14' x 10' x 11’ (4.3m x 3m x 3.4m)

2008

Multimedia Installation, Aronoff Center for Art and Design, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio

9’7”x 8’7”x 18’ (2.9m x 2.6m x 5.5m)

2007

“An entire past comes to dwell in a new house.”

–Gaston Bachelard1

To say that this house was haunted before it was built is to acknowledge as Bachelard does that a house is the culmination of all the houses in which we have ever dwelt. More than a physical space, it is a space constituted through memory and imagination. It is a physical and psychological space. The house is not haunted in any colloquial sense, nor does it make blatant use of the familiar tropes associated with the “haunted house”. It is more accurately an unheimlich house in that it turns the very locus of the heimlich (the homely) into something unheimlich (unhomely). Like the House of Usher, there is no invading spirit, but rather the house itself is the source of the strangeness. In the house, physical space corresponds to psychological space and as such is fragmented, discontinuous and indeterminate.

1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p.5.