Anne Buckwalter’s erotic interiors are on display in San Francisco

What lies beneath the surface of a seemingly innocuous home environment? For Anne Buckwalter, an environment littered with the routines of its inhabitants is rich in intimate codes. In her pictures nothing is as it seems. Flattened perspectives distort traditional proportions and mix a fantastical element with considerations of queerness and sexuality in a happy marriage of everydayness and pleasure.

Interiors are synonymous with psychological spaces for Buckwalter, who draws on American folk art and Pennsylvania Dutch traditions for her richly drawn interiors – the latter a nod to her childhood in rural Pennsylvania. If you look closely, you can see the subversive details of a private life, in the blood stain on a mattress, in the whip in the laundry room, or in the grass stains on knees.

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist)

“I like to create spaces for pleasure and eroticism alongside the everyday, hygienic and healthy.”

“I arrange disparate objects together to represent how we embody feelings, values ​​and desires that can be seen as incompatible with each other,” says Buckwalter. “I’m particularly interested in how this relates to sexuality; I like to create spaces for pleasure and eroticism alongside the everyday, hygienic and healthy. I think culturally we’re conditioned to focus on what’s binary or straightforward – we don’t have much innate patience or compassion for murky gray areas. But I think that being complicated, changeable and ambivalent is a universal and fundamentally human thing, and I feel a responsibility to reflect this in my work.”

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist)

The spaces in her paintings are created from a mix of memories and images from books, with Buckwalter leaving room for improvisation during the creation process. “For the most part, I like paintings best that have something awkward, unresolved, or awkward about them,” she adds. “They feel the truest.” For example, in Grass stainsthere is some real temporal and spatial nonsense: the jumpsuit in the bottom right corner is presumably the same item of clothing that the figure outside the window in the top left is wearing, but they exist at the same time in the same plane. And the room is pretty sparsely furnished – there’s a rug on the floor and a painting on the wall, but no furniture. I had originally planned to include furniture, but I ended up liking the strange division of the composition into four quadrants, so I left it as is. I think it’s more successful this way, even if it’s completely unrealistic; You would never come across a space like this.’

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist)

The houses, presented as cross-sections, literally dismantle traditional representations and question the relationship between domesticity and femininity. “Homes have traditionally been coded as feminine, and I’m interested in the relationship between interior spaces and the construction of female identity.” As a child, I experienced a lot of shame and silence around sex and reproductive health, the body and queerness. These are the topics that I am most attracted to and interested in exploring now. I think that exploring these themes in the context of spaces decorated like the spaces I grew up in is a way to reconcile my past and current identities. And more broadly, I hope my work can contribute to a broader conversation about reproductive rights, the liberation of the female body, and the normalization of sexual expression.”