image credit: Alfie Turnshek-Goins
THE WENDY HOUSE (2011)
an interactive performance and installation by
heather warren-crow and kelly rafferty
an interactive performance and installation by
heather warren-crow and kelly rafferty
In our interactive performance and installation The Wendy House, Tinkerbell is on uppers and Wendy is a drunk. They labor, quite literally, to maintain the deteriorating colonial architecture of a Neverland that Peter Pan created with his powerful imagination. But empires rise only to fall apart. The material infrastructure of power needs constant maintenance, leaving Wendy a kind of worn-out, desperate housewife and Tinkerbell an abused and angry woman-child. Both are silly. They pine the loss of a man-child they never really had. Like the white cube of the art gallery, Peter Pan gets his presence from absence. The art gallery and the boy who wouldn’t grow up are believed to be blank slates, white skins.
The Wendy House is a home built by misogyny, white supremacist femininity, colonial failure, junk food, high heels, the history of action-based body art, bad pop music and even worse dancing, self help books, and those foolish, dangerous dreams of island utopias. It was originally exhibited at Arizona State University's ArtSpace West in October of 2011.
The script for this production was published in the Fall/Winter 2012 issue of the academic journal Women's Studies Quarterly.
image credit: Alfie Turnshek-Goins