“My BLISS images are 2-d dioramas of domesticity, constructed from advertising images of the Norman Rockwell era, when American housewives wore pearls in the kitchen and swooned over their new appliances. They also are soap operas—like those created to entertain the same housewives once their Hoovering was done and the jello mould tucked safely in the fridge.

Text scanned from 1940s and ’50s True Story, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies Home Journal activates these tableaux of that era of seeming innocence—which, like our own, wasn’t all that innocent. Just as soap operas of the day titillated their audiences with sex and scandal, Madison Avenue sold products by juxtaposing squeaky-clean vistas of happy home with double entendre and sexual innuendo. The BLISS images allude to infidelity and other secrets lurking in outwardly perfect homes—but also suggest the fantasy life many a housewife must have permitted herself while tossing socks into the miracle Apex washer.” -Darcy Davenport