Mark Robbins

Households

2003

The impulse for this work goes back to collegiate forays into sociology and filmmaking. Looking at the houses of family and friends — mostly young architects whose apartments looked nothing like the iconic rooms we studied in school or the ones we designed for others — I imagined House and Garden layouts, fully propped and framed, but of places on Avenue B or in Hell’s Kitchen or Bayside, Queens. 

The subjects of these pictures are friends, relatives, acquaintances, and their friends. I think of these groupings in terms of older forms of portraiture, from the trompe l'oeil images, paneled walls, and life-sized figures in Pompeian courtyards to the flanking saints of altarpieces, from Giulio Romano’s fresco giants to Vermeer’s great women. These figures, like those, are posed with their raiment in relation to space, recording the person in the moment with décor, fashion, and furnishings — and a window to the outside world. The images here also borrow from the soft-core glossiness of fitness and home magazines, the buoyant comfort of Gap ads and J. Crew catalogues.