Elizabeth Duffy

Elizabeth Duffy

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  • Current Work: Wearing
    • Video of Wearing / 19th c dress
  • Ongoing : Maximum Security: 50 States Wallpapers, Textiles, Drawings and Installations
  • Maximum Security
    • Security Envelope Projects
      • Neo, at the Milwaukee Art Museum
      • Apartment 2B, at DM Contemporary, NYC
      • Overlander, Hamilton Gallery, Newport, RI
      • Westbeth North Light, Westbeth Gallery, NYC
      • See Through
      • Prolonged Exposure and Repetition Delirium
      • Twin Lens Reflex, Governor's Island, NY
      • Day Job, The Drawing Center, NYC
      • Tobey Street, Providence, RI
      • Security Envelope Quilts and Drawings
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      • Security Envelope Icebergs
      • Penumbra
    • Maximum Security: Quilts and Textiles
  • Insidious Objects
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  • Curatorial: Dead Ringer at the Bristol Art Museum, RI, June/July 2019
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Maximum Security, 50 States, Rhode Island
2018
2 color silkscreen on paper
variable

This wallpaper was adapted from a fragment of a19th century toile pattern that I found on Ebay. I replaced the buildings in the original with images of Howard Prison, now known as the Adult Correctional Institution in Cranston, RI. Barbed wire festoons, barred windows and weapons were also drawn into the original pattern. Howard Prison was built in the 19th century, a period of prison reform and expansion, as well as a period of expanding material wealth for the growing middle class. Wallpaper was a sign of this wealth, and it was used extensively in home decoration. Toile and other panoramic papers gave viewers a sense of an expansive tranquility. This altered toile highlights the cost of that tranquility, pointing to our current culture of incarceration and referencing the philosopher Jeremy Benthem’s idea of the panopticon as a surveillance device, an all-seeing eye that instills behavior control through paranoia.


Printer: Beth Brandon, Photo Courtesy The RISD Museum


All images copyright of Elizabeth Duffy, 1998-2022

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