- Dora's Room crosses different mediums
and different centuries, because it really is a feeling
that just persists everywhere.
It's this feeling of extreme desire and weakness
and vulnerability that we're all so terrified to feel,
but something that can ultimately lead to
a much more emotionally rich life,
even though it can be terrifying.
Dora is Freud's most famous hysteric patient,
and she was brought in by her father
to be treated for her hysteria,
and so really I'm using hysteria as a framework
for understanding contemporary, like modern desire.
One of Freud's biggest successes was the fact
that he acknowledged that he was a failure.
One of the biggest, most important parts of the case
is when he acknowledges the fact that Dora
was not in fact heterosexual, and that she was bisexual.
And so him kind of realizing his own flaws
opened up a lot of conversation for, just like,
the unknowable, just constantly being an unknown,
and that's kind of where the room comes in.
So the bed is an inversion of Freud's couch.
I think the couch is kind of one of the most famous images
of psychoanalysis, there's just like, this thing
that you lie on, and you're looking up at the ceiling,
and you're just talking.
So this is really the unconscious of the couch,
which is Dora's bed.
And it's woven with yarn.
The yarn evokes a sense of domesticity,
it evokes a sense of femininity,
and the color red has a sense of like, body horror.
I was thinking about the film Carrie
when I was making the bed.
I was also thinking about Roman Polanski,
the film Grave by Julia Ducournau,
so a lot of these like, French horror films
and American avant-garde films, they really draw on
this sense of like, a fear of the woman's body,
both like her own, and just like an outside fear of it.
And so this is a bust cast out of fabric and resin,
and it's a more physical representation
of that sense of bodily horror.
So the case itself is actually called
Fragments of an Analysis of Hysteria,
and so I wanted to play with this idea of fragments.
So I kind of took symbols from the case
and fragments from the case also.
One of the most important symbols is the jewelry box,
which is in one of Dora's dreams.
And so she has this dream where she's running outside
of her room and she needs to take a jewelry box,
and so this is that.
It has a hand sticking out of hit,
kind of playing the motif of body horror and just tactility,
and extreme desire which is so tied to our senses,
and just what we touch.
And also to evoke that are these pieces of fur
which I've placed in the box,
the fur also is kind of a reference to Surrealist imagery,
and the Surrealists drew heavily on the hysteric process
of just intense feeling and not really thinking.
So more feeling rather than analysis.
The hand motif, we have the hands sticking up,
which is a different symbol.
That goes back to Carrie again, where at the very end
of the film Carrie reaches out from the grave
and her hand is just kind of frozen there,
and it's extremely horrific.
But that sense of horror is also tied to the feelings
that we have when we're reading texts
and these are a collection of hysteric texts,
such at The Glass Menagerie, Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood,
there's Lolita, who is probably one of the most famous
and notorious Hysteric women that we know about in fiction.
And then The Bell Jar, which was one of my favorite books
when I was young, so it's kind of a collection of things
and thinking about how text moves off the page,
and so I've also played with the color red in marking texts
with red paint that are particular affective to me,
so thinking about how text moves off through emotion.