As part of the Nostos exhibition, in which I considered pandemic-lockdown life as experienced through windows and electronic screens, I created two discrete installations of small portraits. Both addressed the digital nature of human interactions of the period, and both loosely referenced themes from The Odyssey. While Odysseus was on his long journey, Penelope remained steadfast that her husband was alive and would return home. Believing him dead, scores of suitors pestered her for her hand, as well as her husband’s throne and fortune, in marriage. Penelope resisted their advances by promising to choose one when she had finished weaving a death shroud for her father-in-law, but she tricked them for many years by weaving during the day and then picking apart her work each night.
Proci (the Suitors) makes reference to Penelope’s suitors. I used profiles from a dating website which exhibit an interesting array of performative masculinity. The portraits (108 of them, tracking the number of Penelope’s suitors), are installed in a grid superimposed over a frayed textile element, suggesting Penelope’s labourious weaving and unweaving project – and also (since the textile resembles a fishnet) alluding to many of the men’s fondness for showing off dead fish. A tertiary reference is to the dating website Plenty of Fish, from which I gleaned my images.