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Domestic Life is a temporal project visually chronicling the artist’s first nine months of parenting through highly formalist compositions of her kitchen table. Van Dyk’s patient documentation captures the duration of her child’s infancy by turning not to subjects but objects. Stripped of the image of child and parent, these portraits of the domestic insist on the exquisite, sustaining forms of the home interior rendered noncommercial: vibrart green Vitra chairs, circular Fritz Hansen table, Stokke high chair, pepper grinder, flower bouquets, fresh produce, a cat, remnants of a mealtime. Scenic repetition bows to maternity’s many physical and professional constraints while simultaneously insisting on the significance of the architecture of domesticity. Trained to execute an aesthetic of capitalist consumption for home goods marketing, Van Dyk’s varied representations here prompt viewers to question one’s sense of value as it flickers between zones of production and reproduction. 

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