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Lazy Susan

Direct print on Dibond.Mechanical Frame, lacquered wood, metal bearing.
2023

Christine Frederick was a home economist and kitchen innovator who revolutionized women’s labor by applying ideas from Taylorism to the home. From 1912 through the 1940s, Frederick transformed her house into a lab. Applecroft Home Experiment Station in Greenlawn, New York, became an experimental setting where design, time and motion measurement, and production management were applied to home chores to increase women’s productivity in their domestic lives and relieve them from being “weighed down with drudging labor.” As a feminist, Christine Frederick inspired the middle-class American housewife, elevating women’s labor and understanding motherhood and domestic life as specialized work. But Frederick's experiments hide a beautiful contradiction implicit in the fact of pursuing women's liberation through an alienated system such as Taylorism – a scientific management method consisting of dividing specific tasks to gain effectiveness based on time measurement and surveillance- a process where pursuing productivity gains, turns labor into alienating and dehumanizing. In this series of sculptures, the physical structure of a circular tray is known as a Lazy Susan, one of the furniture pieces Frederic advocated, used to reduce women’s work when serving at the table. By being hung on the wall, these trays lose their function and become a critical tool where the images begin to spin, using the force of time and movement in the opposite direction to the logic of efficiency and productivity imposed by Taylorism. In a vibrant moment where a critique of Wester Feminism needs to be articulated - by battling against universalizing methodologies and redefining the idea of gender under the pressing issue of transgender women’s rights - the turning gestures become a dynamic sign that leaves room for interpretation, revolving around the idea of how the body is impacted by history, economy, and representation. Ira Lombardía

Lazy Susan
Lazy Susan
Lazy Susan
Lazy Susan

Ira Lombardía Studio
150 Westminster Ave
Syracuse, NY, 13210, USA
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