Homebodies

August 2, 2014 – September 6, 2014

The works in Homebodies, Tin Garcia’s latest collection of paintings and installations, take inspiration from the Book of Hours, a Christian devotional manual from the Middle Ages. The creators of these illuminated manuscripts added luxurious amounts of embellishments and iconography- the same details that can be found blossoming on Tin’s lavish canvases.

The Book of Hours advocated a rigid set of instructions for prayer and worship. Tin adapted this austere program for the creation of her works. For hours on end, she sat below her paintings, painstakingly embroidering each flower, each vine, and each cord. These thousands of stitches transformed the creative process into a form of artistic monasticism. But instead of praising the holy, Tin’s works revealed the delicious kinks of women in bondage.

Much like prayer, bondage can exist as a form of public theater. For some players, bondage unfolds along the peripheries of performance art, public exhibition- and even cosplay. 

… and then, there are the individuals who see bondage as a private ritual, their deepest kinks more akin to a personal prayer than a bombastic sacrament. In this group of embroidered paintings, Tin unveils acts of bondage taking place behind doors. A lustrous ponygirl chomps on her bit while scrubbing the floor. An obedient maid takes loving punishment – perhaps for bungling a household chore?        

These daily devotions take meaning from their seemingly banal context- after all, acts done in private, away from the gaze of vying peers, are often the most sincere. As it is with these women, so it is with the artist, bound to her creative process, realizing that the act of relinquishing freedom is in itself an assertion of power.