Death on the Dance Floor is a site-specific installation created in house number 9 on Leona Drive, the home of Ruth Gillespie, who passed away on the dance floor.  It is an installation that addresses the 1950’s housewife, which was inspired by my grandmother’s domestic ritual of changing into a dress before serving dinner each night and the old saying “save your pennies for a rainy day”.

I enjoy working with the narrative and nostalgic histories found within our lives and culture and thought it was important for this piece to retain such a narrative.  For me it was an entry point to engage with the work, as the process was a diligent task with repetitive acts and careful precision carried out over four weeks.  I started asking people to donate their saved pennies they had tucked away in drawers and closets so I could use them in the installation.  After 10,000 nails were precisely inserted into the walls of the room, the walls and nails were painted black and a white painted penny was carefully glued to each nail, overall forming the graphic black and white polk-a-dot pattern.  The installation took four weeks to complete with help of friends and volunteers. 

The installation became these snapshots of moments in time, with connections to old black and white family photos, the fashionable polk-a-dot dress associated to the era, as well as traditional domestic roles and rituals.  It was also a snapshot of Ruth’s last dance.  A dome crystal chandelier, hanging in the centre of the room like a disco ball on the dance floor and the pennies in place where thousands of spinning reflections of light would be cast.

Something that was uncontrollable in the space was the sunlight that periodically filled the room, casting these beautiful shadows beside the pennies.  It brought life to the work, bringing the pattern that optically looked two-dimensional to another level.  As the day would pass the shadows would shift slightly as though to signify the shift in time as our ideologies have changed regarding the domestic realm. 

The physical elements of the installation; the pennies collected from people’s domestic spaces, then the careful arrangement to form the fabric pattern of a dress, and the repetitive acts involved in the process, all help portray the domestic space in relation to a uniformity found in suburban culture.  Overall, I wanted the work to be visually stimulating and a little dizzying. Paying homage to the eras utopian housewife who carried out these repetitive domestic acts while fulfilling a larger social role based on traditional values.  The walls of the room became a fragile façade, in this case built of pennies so delicately suspended off the end of nails, which were constantly at the risk of collapsing.