Shell at Del Vaz Projects
Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Contemporary Art Review LA
March 2022
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist horror story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” was published in 1892 at the tail end of the Victorian era, a period that was in many ways defined by sharply delineated gender and social spheres. Confined to a single room, Gilman’s Victorian housewife reconciles the tensions of surface and structure, containment and freedom, by projecting her consciousness onto the wallpaper so fiercely that she merges with the house itself. The bones of this narrative—gender, body, house, containment, coalescence, subconscious, the unknown—are the stuff of Shell, an exhibition that concentrates its philosophical inquiry so deftly and so densely that it might knock you cold if it weren’t for Del Vaz Projects’ blissfully tranquil setting. […]