CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (CLARKSVILLENOW) – There is an immediate feeling of nostalgia and empathy to the black and white images of Nashville artist Kit Kite’s X Housewife series. Ironing boards, utensils, and Tupperware are just some of the objects filling Kite’s large scaled photographs.
The exhibition is comprised of three suites: The X Drafts 2013-2014, The X Housewife Portraits, and Object X, which is a 2014 film installation. The short film and visual narrative spoken by the artist was created as a descriptive response to the title The X Housewife Portraits. Further enhancing the concept, the film is viewed in a stark white one-room-house installation.
Kite is a self-taught artist. She describes the work as a self-experimental portrait and installation series that depicts the cognitive differences of house and home. This series explores the artist’s personal displacement and separation within an isolated process, the objectivity of memory, materiality, and the limiting conditions of one’s physical surroundings contrasted with the desires to connect in relationships to another.
The human form is obstructed by the posing scenes made up of the common domesticated tool and household object. By enhancing the displacement of one’s own physical surroundings, the object and its value is exploited and defined.
The X Housewife Portraits was a concept first developed on Instagram. Using a mobile device, Kit shot hand-held self-portraits in her bathroom mirror while posing with an assortment of obstructions made from common objects found around her house. These 7,000 drafted self-portraits document her process and depict the assimilation of one’s identity, isolation, and temporary disappointment- a prolific study by the artist.
Kit Kite will be presenting a gallery talk for the museum’s Art & Lunch program on September 7. The event is free to the public and begins at 12:15 p.m.
The X Housewife series will be on exhibit in the Customs House Museum’s Orgain and Bruner Galleries through October 22. Located at the corner of Second and Commerce Streets, the Customs House Museum is the second largest general museum in Tennessee. For more information on above exhibition contact Terri Jordan, Exhibits Curator by phone at 931-648-5780 or by email at terri@customshousemuseum.org.