Clothes do not interest her. They hang on her body as if they are there only because there is no place else for them to go, like men on street corners, like children on the school playground on weekends.
–bell hooks, Bone Black (1996)
There were likely numerous storage boxes that accompanied Diamond Stingily on the day she started concocting a domicile inside 52 Walker. As you’d anticipate when it comes to any renovation, particularly one of this calibre, an obscene, even exorbitant, amount of closet space would be appropriated to play host to an assortment of shelf-straining commodities. Despite the fact that bell hooks’ Bone Black memoir is a guest, as well as a catalyst to this artist’s practice.
Through this perspective, even innocuous objects come with a profound sentimentalism. In these circumstances we find ourselves looking back on, or opening a window to, the past. Within her presentation, the keys to either come in a heterogeneity of shapes and sizes, demonstrable by the incorporation of “site-specific architectural interventions” that, as per the press release, “evoke the colours, scale and ambience of suburban American households and places of worship.” In this, the artist is triumphant, a consummate host, to put it more appropriately, who makes certain to fluff the cushions, straighten the crucifix and leave a fresh set of toiletries in the guest room.
On the other hand, there are also more indelible impressions present within Orgasms Happened Here that cannot be scrubbed out or bleached, tidied up or packed away in a seemingly orderly pile. The showcase rents a place for itself in the nostalgic levity that accompanied its creator over the course of her adolescence, beginning with a post-it that her brother discovered above the door of his closet: “orgasms happened here,” and continuing through newspaper cutouts. Reinforcing the belief that we find our earliest prologues in the symbolism of such knick-knacks as much as they find a home in the museums and art galleries they come to occupy.
Bikini-clad women on cars and motorcycles are on the cover of Hot Girl. They’ve influenced Stingily’s self-perception as she came to understand the lack of autonomy that black women, in particular, hold over their bodies. Introspective considerations such as these enter Orgasms Happened Here as much as they are evicted from it. This is an analogy that is demonstrable through Stingily's choice to leave her wooden shutters neither entirely open nor fully closed but somewhere in-between.
It’s through these gaps that alternative macrocosms (and actualities) are encouraged to present themselves to observers, albeit incongruous ones that take their cue from the likes of Bluebeard, a French folktale centred around the titular aristocrat’s spouse discovering his previous wives inside arcane chambers or the conceptualisations that governed Martin Wong throughout his oeuvre. Paying adulation to Martin Wong is a collapsing brick structure in one wardrobe and sports bats propped up in another. Altogether, the ocular characteristics that this artist summons are both ambiguous and explicit, jocular and calamitous; they respond to the duality that she so earnestly seeks.
Where these interpretations begin to become Diamond Stingily’s own is open to discussion, but that doesn’t mean those considerations aren’t instigated at numerous junctures throughout the space. Particular attention should be given to the stained-glass windows that emulate art-deco-orientated modus operandi belonging to Stingily’s great-great-aunt’s Baptist church in Chicago. Here, they conduct a service of their own, one that extols the evolutions between the previous (grandparents), present (parents) and the next (children) generations whilst acknowledging the domicile as an instigator of those changes, and the object as an immovable custodian of the days, months, years, decades and lifetimes past. What’s more, door as well as iron fence sculptural creations configured from everyday objects rest elsewhere on Orgasms Happened Here’s property line, indirectly guarding the numerous conceptualisations this show contains, particularly those including solitude, metamorphosis, curiosity and disobedience, not against an imaginary thief but from the commotion of the outside world that is trying to break through the tranquillity this space relishes in. With that being said, feel free to step inside, just don’t forget to close the door behind you.
