Our inspiration for the work in this show – indeed, the very reason we were excited to show here – is HAUS itself, a site that uniquely embodies the overlap between public and private. House (private), Gallery (public) provides a vantage point from which to explore the contemporary state of the breakdown between these increasingly indistinct concepts.

A house is public; a home is private. Through the calm, ordered form of the “real estate walk-through video” that litters websites like youtube, we are seduced into imagining any one of a series of houses as a possible home. By the same token, any one in a series of homes can be a set, or a stage, for a possible real-estate video. To actualize that potential stage, we inserted ourselves as actors into homes graciously provided by members of the social network surrounding HAUS.

Consciously or unconsciously, we are being inserted into social networks all the time, through the medium of “Party Pics” – those ubiquitous images portraying the narrative of the social that are the cornerstone of websites like facebook and flickr. While at any given moment our presence in a social situation can give way to images in the network, we decided to stage a situation where stand-ins perform the social image-producing role for us. And we chose to project our contemporary model of sociability into the past, to see how it looks cast in the warm glow of nostalgia.

For the hallway at HAUS we chose to take on another form straddling the public/private divide, a feature now ubiquitous on DVDs, that of the commentary track. If we consider the public face of the DVD to be the movie itself, inherent to the package is the assumption that we also want to know the backstory, the anecdotes of production. Don’t we? We watch movies with a sophisticated set of expectations and judge those movies on whether our expectations are met. The inclusion of the commentary track seems to be a gesture that assumes the accompanying movie is going to meet our expectations. If the studios can make the assumption that the audience is going to ‘like’ the movie enough to care about the backstory, we are making the assumption that the movie, or “the work,” is superfluous, and forward only the anecdotal evidence of its production.