Elizabeth Watkins
562.773.7370
Untitled (Sopranos’ Kitchen)
still diptych projection
dimensions variable
I’ve been a fan of an HBO program called The Sopranos. Through the course of my regular, avid viewing, I’ve noticed that a lot of the action takes place in the titular family’s kitchen. And, because I’ve spent so much time in this kitchen, or feel like I have, I’ve developed personal associations with it. It’s like I’ve had meals there, been to parties there, been involved in heated arguments there –all within this set, and so I (and I would imagine, most of the viewers) think of it not as a set, but as a real space, with a lived history.
I realized that this place is so central to the show but we only get to see it fragmented and in the background.
So I started pulling stills of it and pieced together something like 10 fragments to make a panoramic diptych of the setting that is so important in a show that has been so significant to so many people. In the resulting piece, I exchange the figure for the ground, and project it in the gallery space as close to actual size as possible, in a literalization of the experience all television viewers have of projecting themselves into the space where the action happens.
To put it another way, I’m taking a TV set that isn’t a real space but which we as viewers –or at least we who subscribe to premium cable channels –believe in as a real space and then making it into another kind of simulacrum, one that people can interact with in the physical space of the gallery. Now we can sit with Tony, Carmela, AJ and Meadow in their kitchen –or at least in their place.