Public/Private

As I made efforts to protect from disease by staying home in the early days of the pandemic, I felt the weight of the fact that a home is inevitably quite porous. During this time the boundary between public and private space was shifted by stay-at-home orders issued by state and local governments in the interest of public health, highlighting how the collective delineation between public and private space is dynamic in response to circumstance. While these two types of spaces are never fully stable or discrete from one another, we find it critical to define them as inherently different. For instance, the 4th Amendment relies on the concept of a person’s home as distinct from public space and therefore protected from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. Also, the right to privacy as a legal concept was the basis of the decision in Roe v. Wade, and was the foundation for queer rights in Lawrence v. Texas. With the unprecedented reversal of Roe, many decisions based on the concept of a right to privacy are now at risk of being overturned. This series layers the words “public” and “private” in a blue and red color scheme that can be viewed with 3D glasses to produce a disorienting effect as a reminder that because we actively construct and reconstruct these vital concepts, they are in jeopardy of being fully deconstructed if we do not hold on to and defend them.