after you, 2016
The sculptures in After You originate from familiar bathroom features such as towel dispensers, soap dishes, bathroom stalls, and restroom insignia. Together they form extra-ordinary pieces that distort the scale and function of bathroom surroundings and ask the viewer to reconsider their public grooming associations, as well as constructions of cleanliness.
How do we negotiate the simultaneously private and public space of the restroom? Intervening with certain elements typically found in these spaces—placing soap dishes with bars of soap on the opposite side of the installed soap dispensers, or removing signage denoting the space as gendered “male” or “female,” and placing mirrors on the doors—the work addresses access, the politicization and policing of public restrooms, and the notion of false privacy. For gender non-conforming individuals, navigating the seemingly simple activity of using a public restroom is, in the artist’s words, one of “always being aware of how you are being perceived, and of negotiating belonging.”
In addition to interventions within the space of the restroom, After You includes a 30-foot long soap dish sculpture, featuring the joined soap remnants of many kind donors. The varying levels of use, dirtiness, and shape of the soap bits reveal traces of the individuals who donated them. In Stall, 2016, Ramstad recreates a bathroom stall, using reclaimed materials, but adds a welcome mat, wallpaper, and a working telephone. At certain times throughout the exhibition’s duration, the artist will call the phone, speaking to whomever might be in the stall at that time. Like After You, 2016, this work asks us to reconsider how we all participate in bathroom rituals, and if any of us are ever allowed to truly enjoy privacy in publicly regulated spaces.
Instead of focusing on the ways in which we are divided and separated, Ramstad’s work encourages the viewer to imagine how we are connected through the universality of function in the daily behaviors we all enact—from using the restroom to washing our hands. The viewer is asked to contemplate the following questions: Who is regulating privacy and public space? What are the rules that we follow because we think we have to? How do we craft our own sense of belonging in these spaces?
Gallery Guide essay, "On Negotiation: Belonging and the Politics of Choice" by Susannah Magers, Curator, Art and Public Engagement, Rochester Art Center. To view PDF, click here.
Photos by Erin Young
How do we negotiate the simultaneously private and public space of the restroom? Intervening with certain elements typically found in these spaces—placing soap dishes with bars of soap on the opposite side of the installed soap dispensers, or removing signage denoting the space as gendered “male” or “female,” and placing mirrors on the doors—the work addresses access, the politicization and policing of public restrooms, and the notion of false privacy. For gender non-conforming individuals, navigating the seemingly simple activity of using a public restroom is, in the artist’s words, one of “always being aware of how you are being perceived, and of negotiating belonging.”
In addition to interventions within the space of the restroom, After You includes a 30-foot long soap dish sculpture, featuring the joined soap remnants of many kind donors. The varying levels of use, dirtiness, and shape of the soap bits reveal traces of the individuals who donated them. In Stall, 2016, Ramstad recreates a bathroom stall, using reclaimed materials, but adds a welcome mat, wallpaper, and a working telephone. At certain times throughout the exhibition’s duration, the artist will call the phone, speaking to whomever might be in the stall at that time. Like After You, 2016, this work asks us to reconsider how we all participate in bathroom rituals, and if any of us are ever allowed to truly enjoy privacy in publicly regulated spaces.
Instead of focusing on the ways in which we are divided and separated, Ramstad’s work encourages the viewer to imagine how we are connected through the universality of function in the daily behaviors we all enact—from using the restroom to washing our hands. The viewer is asked to contemplate the following questions: Who is regulating privacy and public space? What are the rules that we follow because we think we have to? How do we craft our own sense of belonging in these spaces?
Gallery Guide essay, "On Negotiation: Belonging and the Politics of Choice" by Susannah Magers, Curator, Art and Public Engagement, Rochester Art Center. To view PDF, click here.
Photos by Erin Young