Yellow Wallpaper Installation, 1990, Alice Hotel, 14th and Alice Street, Oakland, California. Based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, first published in 1892. Also referenced: Gilman's 1935 autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
"This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then." p.8
"The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight." p.5
"It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house - to reach the smell. But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell." p.15
"I really have discovered something... The front pattern does move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over." p.15
Yellow Wallpaper installation map
"On February 6th we moved (Dora, Katharine and I) to 1258 Webster Street, taking three furnished rooms... On the eighth: 'I take Katharine to her first school, Miss Wyman, on Alice Street a lovely girl, the teacher, just a pleasant little home school, Kate likes it.'" - The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gillman, 1935, pg. 137
Yellow Wallpaper installation, 1990
Yellow Wallpaper and the following works were made in reaction to the various novels and short stories discussed in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published in 1979.
The Actress, 1994, acrylic, house paint, graphite, scratch letters on canvas and wood, 30x35", private collection, New York
Primeira Carta, 1994, mix media on canvas, 67x50", private collection, New York
Bell Jar, 2003, mix media on canvas - detail
The Emperor's Fly, 1991, mix media on canvas with puzzle, private collection New York
Michael, 1991, house paint, t-shirt, scratch letters and plexi on wood
King Lear, 1991, house paint, scratch letters, game pieces, photo, ash and plexi on wood
North Wind, 1989, super-8 film transfered to video, sound, 03:28min.
Based on the opening lines in the Susan Glaspell Keeting's short story, A Jury of Her Peers.
