Housewife: Jennifer Rubell at Sargent’s Daughters

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present Housewife, Jennifer Rubell’s first New York solo exhibition. The show includes new participatory sculptures and interactive paintings. Housewife will open on Wednesday, January 18, 2017 and be on view through February 26, 2017.

The works in Housewife engage the public through temptation, humor and physical suggestion. The traditional viewer/artwork relationship is reconfigured to place the viewer and object in positions of equal power. Interaction is Rubell’s core medium, which she uses to explore a tricky question of female self-definition: the role of others in feminine identity. The second-wave feminism of Rubell’s formative years instilled in the artist the courage to define herself however she pleased, with one glaring exception. “I always had all the skills of a housewife,” says Rubell, “I thought about other people almost all the time, I liked home life, I loved to cook, and yet there was absolutely no chance in hell I would ever consider the idea of being a housewife. That was my rational perspective, and I’m happy I had it, but emotionally, the feminine fantasies, despite their political incorrectness, endured. Today, I have kids, I run a household, but this show is about exploring places I could never bear to go: longing for someone to call me up for a date, getting married, vacuuming in high heels for my husband’s pleasure.”