Look At This

There is a particular kind of American dream that has nothing to do with aspiration. It is, instead, a dream of containment—the vision of the good life not as something you chase but as something you build around yourself like a house. The lawn, the car in the driveway, the children inside, everything gets arranged to suggest that this, finally, is where happiness lives. The American suburbs were invented to make this dream visible, to give it a zip code.

The first time I met Kelly Beeman, we began talking about this topic almost immediately—though I couldn’t have told you then exactly why. Perhaps I recognized something beneath the surface of her work, some pressure held in check by all that beauty. I met with Kelly right before and in the midst of the pandemic, a period when the dream of domestic life was being stress-tested in ways it hadn’t been in decades. We were all suddenly inside our houses, inside our relationships, rethinking what home meant and what we’d been using it to avoid. The fantasy of the contained life—so much of what we had decorated and arranged and performed—became impossible to maintain when you couldn’t leave. And in those conversations with Kelly, I wanted to understand her relationship to all of this and the manicured universe she was building in paint, this world of beautiful women, quiet rooms, and light that seemed always to be falling at the right angle. It felt like her work presupposed exactly the kind of containment the pandemic had cracked open.