Ligia Bouton
Ligia Bouton
Ligia
Bouton
b. 1973 STUDIO IN SANTA FE, NM
Encountering Ligia Bouton’s Understudy for Animal Farm, you are faced with choices. Twenty-eight brightly colored fabric hoods fashioned into pig heads are positioned on a rolling vendor’s cart. Each fabric design suggests a certain style, as they are crafted from pairs of humble domestic pillowcases. Next, you are invited to try one on—in a playful gesture of donning a character costume.
Once inside the mask, however, your vision is largely blocked, and suddenly you are no longer the viewer but the viewed. A playful child’s game of make-believe is now laden with references to a history fraught with power abuses and race conflicts. Bouton relishes these subversions of the idea of domesticity—inserting complications in the seemingly placid materials of home life.
Once inside the mask, however, your vision is largely blocked, and suddenly you are no longer the viewer but the viewed. A playful child’s game of make-believe is now laden with references to a history fraught with power abuses and race conflicts. Bouton relishes these subversions of the idea of domesticity—inserting complications in the seemingly placid materials of home life.
In Animal Farm, there’s a wonderful moment when the pigs really take over: they start walking upright, they move into the farmer’s house, and they start wearing his clothes. So there’s this moment where this symbol of absolute power and corruption that Orwell created moves into this absolute domestic space. I have always been interested in subversive domesticity.
— Ligia Bouton
