Bands of light snake across the bedroom, creeping through the slivered opening in the blinds and passing over the dresser drawer, an unwelcome intruder announcing it’s time to drag yourself out of bed. Stale coffee stagnates in the bottom of the pot—how many days has it been there? Maybe you’ll drink it anyway. The fans whirrs overhead as the faucet steadily drip-drip-drips. As your shower fogs the bathroom mirror, you stand there and stare into it, a blurred absence of yourself. How does it feel to disappear? The task of getting dressed today feels insurmountable, nevermind the fleeting thought of going outside. You traverse the hallway back and forth. Steam gathers on the lid of a boiling pot, refracting and strewing droplets of shadow onto the wall. A lightbulb buzzes continuously overhead. The vase on the windowsill is now lit by the harsh incandescent light, the flowers in it withered, their petals dropped. Peering through the thin lace curtain, you can see light glowing in your neighbors’ apartment windows. Where did the day go?
In Within These Walls, Cait Porter’s paintings capture a sense of domestic ennui, a kind of claustrophobic weariness, a feeling that became intimately familiar in the long weeks and months of the pandemic. In this time, our homes became both our havens and our penitentiaries, offering up protection while also denying us some of the simplest pleasures of life: meeting friends at a bar, enjoying the atmosphere inside a restaurant, taking in sights during the morning commute. Over the past year, we became used to the endless repetition of living the same day, over and over and over again. Porter’s paintings understand this feeling intimately. Her gaze lingers on mundane household objects, gently caressing them with soft light and shadow, holding within them memories, fears, anxieties. Her works teeter on the edge of abstraction and representation, cropping close along unexpected edges, forcing a moment of recognition. These works are records of the passage of time, and of the making of time into an object to be gazed back at. ––Meredith Sellers
Cait Porter (b. 1985, Austin, TX) lives and works in Queens, NY. She received her MFA in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BA in art from Vassar College. Porter’s work has been included in exhibitions at Marinaro in Montana (Bozeman, MT), EFA Project Space (New York, NY), Deanna Evans Projects (Brooklyn, NY) Space 1026 (Philadelphia, PA), Automat Collective (Philadelphia, PA), Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia, PA), Radical Abacus (Santa Fe, NM), and Page Bond Gallery (Richmond, VA). She is a 2018 recipient of the David Wurtzel Travel Fellowship and has participated in residencies at the Catwalk Institute and the Vermont Studio Center.