“Return to Gender: The Greatest Hits of Yesterday’s Tomorrow”
When the past is used as a weapon, memory becomes mythology and mythology becomes a mandate.
A Spoonful of Silence
Domestic Bliss
The Motherland Begins at Home
Clean Thoughts Only
The series “Return to Gender: The Greatest Hits of Yesterday’s Tomorrow" explores the weaponisation of nostalgia and the seductively dangerous allure of a mythological past often invoked by today's populist movements.
Through a deliberately satirical lens, these paintings reimagine 1950s domestic archetypes, with each piece drawing from the visual language of vintage advertisements - flat backgrounds, bright palettes - imagery designed to sell a fantasy.
By warping the familiar and inserting dissonance into the domestic, I aim to unsettle the viewer. The smiles are performative, the absence of eyes indicative of the erasure of identity within tightly scripted gender roles. The domestic order and the rituals of family life become surreal performances.
This intentional distortion speaks to the emotional and political violence lurking beneath the surface of the so-called “good old days”, a past that was never actually real but was manufactured, marketed and mythologized to serve existing power dynamics.
This work is about challenging those myths. It asks the viewer to consider; who benefits from nostalgia? Who is left out of the picture? And what does it cost to keep smiling?