Alana Frances Baer

Exhibition Text for Cynthia Talmadge's Chevy Chase Syndrome
Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA
December 12, 2024



A wife has taken over her diplomat-husband’s office in the US embassy in New Delhi, recasting the cartography of diplomacy as a stage for a theatrical domestic invasion. Images of the family dog have been scattered across the Pacific-centered wall-map. He appears four times in Russia and floats somewhere off the Gulf of Guinea, and a massive dog covers most of Madagascar. If the dog were to scale, he’d be twice as large as the country. The same dog is also in the Bay of Bengal, or maybe in Sri Lanka. Decorative swatches of fabric and bumper stickers from prestigious American schools have been slapped across Africa. A striped square sits atop Egypt, a tweed swatch covers Sudan, and gingham is stapled to South Sudan. My son is a scholar / Mój Syn Jest Uczniem AMERICAN SCHOOL OF WARSAW Established 1982 floats off the coast of Namibia, and My Child is an Honor Student in the South Atlantic Ocean. LYCÉE FRANÇAIS DE MADRID is affixed to the Northeastern corner of Botswana, and Aim. Succeed. Become More. is in the Indian Ocean. AMERICAN SCHOOL OF GUATEMALA is nowhere near Guatemala, though the sticker is approximately the size of Guatemala. Finally, a Pucci bikini stretches from Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in northern Russia, to Krasnokamensk, Zabaykalsky Krai, a town at the Sino-Russian border. The bikini resembles a conspiracy theorist’s red string—except the points and lines fall short of articulating anything at all.


The reconfiguration of American signifiers fail to conjure the familiarity of home, leaving behind a hollow parody of belonging. The map in Coup indexes the wife’s deteriorating psychological state, followed by Protocol, Reception, and Separatists, which chronicle her diplomatic life abroad and her steady slide into psychosis. In Separatists, the wife has meticulously arranged a collection of items across the titular set of neatly made twin beds, preparing them to be packed in a go-bag. Most items are survival-oriented: a flashlight, a hard hat labelled AMBASSADOR, a whistle, a personal medical record, maps, medications, hydroxychloroquine. Others, less so: a paint-soaked jacket, a crewneck from the American School in Tehran emblazoned with FREEDOM and KNOWLEDGE, and numerous books: Foreign Service Girl, Terrorism: Avoidance and Survival, Life and Love in the Foreign Service, Soviet World Outlook, Family Medical Guide. As she accompanies her husband on international diplomatic missions, her unfulfilled ambitions surface sideways—through compulsive rituals like the futile arrangement of objects. The location of the residence remains unspecified—because it could be any consular residence. Each residence in each country features the same curtains, the same set of twin beds, the same side table, lamp, carpet, and fan. Details are standardized from room to room from country to country—with the exception of a single local artifact: an American indicator of the foreign surroundings, equally a foreign indicator of American dislocation.


*

.


Next, in four highly subjective scenes from the perspective of the wife during her time in the foreign service (c. 1972-1983), we see the walls, cars, clothes, and furniture she once marshaled into orderly, elegant formulations begin to take revenge. A 1982 Chevrolet Cavalier Sedan is parked in front of an unspecified consulate, and the composition is fractured in a starburst pattern—multicolored triangles radiating outwards from a centered focal point. The visual lexicon of the time becomes the conduit through which her psychosis manifests, with symptoms aestheticized through optical tricks and stylized distortions like this. In another scene, a 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood adorned with miniature American and El Salvadoran flags hovering above the headlights is parked at an airplane tarmac. The scene captures a quieter internal moment of struggle against herself: the composition ripples delicately and diagonally as San Salvador, not the city she once dreamed of living in, becomes the site and subject of her disillusionment. She prepares to fly elsewhere, in hopes that the next destination might fulfill her fantasies—offering an escape from reality and herself. The force of her psychosis continues to confuse boundaries between her unreal reality and the world as it is. The more the wife tries to fit her environment to her worldview, the more distorted her reality grows.


Her hallucinations spill outwards, merging with her surroundings until indistinguishable from them—as when an office in an embassy morphs into two offices in two embassies. There are two wooden executive desks, two upholstered chairs, two typewriters, two radios, two telephones, two lamps, and two rugs. An office in London and another in Tangier meet at a UN flag in the middle—as if to unite the two countries and fracture the wife’s vision. The spatial doubling recalls Separatists, where one location stands in for many, but here, that indexical ambiguity is replaced by multiple spaces in a singular field of vision. A portrait is hung on the curtain, a trash can dissolves into a carpet, and the London cityscape is enclosed by the rigid geometry of the office. Spatial differentiation and rules of perspective collapse in the wife’s desperate effort to replicate structure as it dissolves. In Jakarta, the wife stands before an opulent fountain and façade outside the American embassy. She does not see the barren expanse of concrete stretching on either side of the heavily stylized structures. What she sees is water spewing in the sunlight, dizzying shimmers of color splashing across the fountain and façade. Confetti everywhere, rainbow everything. Star-spangled vision. Ripples, flickers, flares. Objects and images without material form, monuments replicating and dissolving. We are witnessing the wife’s transient ischemic attack. The extravagant atmosphere suggests her oblivion to her own illness; she is lost in a world more vivid than reality, where symptoms become spectacle.


*

.


Finally, three linen-covered panels are labeled 1968, 1977, and 1986, respectively. Drawings are pinned across their surfaces, with subject matter repeating from panel to panel, decade to decade, mood to mood. The 1968 panel offers an interior design sketch of the wife’s Study at Winfield House in London—her dream posting—alongside faux embassy letterhead reads Embassy of the United States of America, Prague, Czechoslovakia, another city where she’d also be happy to live. By 1977, the fantasy contracts, and the letterhead reads Embassy of the United States of America, Bogotá, Colombia. Its 1989 version chronicles the embassies she has actually been stationed: not the UK nor Czechoslovakia but the USSR, Bahrain, Germany, Belgium, Burma, and Guyana.


On an advertisement for the Overseas Diplomatic and Consular Buildings from the Office of Foreign Buildings, the wife has inscribed BE MY VALENTINE and HOME SWEET HOME. She visualizes the phrase in 1977 when she longingly draws her home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. One such drawing converts her husband’s office into a nursery, another depicts large American flags stationed in her real or imagined son’s bedroom—a nod to the diplomatic career she envisions for him, and never had herself. A 1968 drawing of an unrealized American embassy in Bangkok celebrates modern architecture in technicolor. Eleven years later, the wife vandalized that drawing of the Bangkok building with a devil and an explosion. In its final iteration, a romantic watercolor of the never-built Bangkok embassy features a skylight which casts soft pink light across a polished floor—a dream deferred.


Deferred at least until the 80s, when the wife returns home, if she ever left. The drawings she made before she left and once back home resemble each other, and the dog was always in this affluent American suburb—never in Russia, never in Madagascar. Much like Consular Residence or the Affluent American Suburb, the wife is also any or many wives, and her life abroad a careful choreography of sameness. The wives remain absent from the composition and unnamed, and the sole signifer of their subjectivity and psychosis is this place called home.


Cynthia Talmadge (b. 1989) lives and works in New York, NY.





Marc Selwyn
Los Angeles, CA
December 12, 2024




Exhibition Text for Cynthia Talmadge's Chevy Chase Syndrome
Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA
December 12, 2024




A wife has taken over her diplomat-husband’s office in the US embassy in New Delhi, recasting the cartography of diplomacy as a stage for a theatrical domestic invasion. Images of the family dog have been scattered across the Pacific-centered wall-map. He appears four times in Russia and floats somewhere off the Gulf of Guinea, and a massive dog covers most of Madagascar. If the dog were to scale, he’d be twice as large as the country. The same dog is also in the Bay of Bengal, or maybe in Sri Lanka. Decorative swatches of fabric and bumper stickers from prestigious American schools have been slapped across Africa. A striped square sits atop Egypt, a tweed swatch covers Sudan, and gingham is stapled to South Sudan. My son is a scholar / Mój Syn Jest Uczniem AMERICAN SCHOOL OF WARSAW Established 1982 floats off the coast of Namibia, and My Child is an Honor Student in the South Atlantic Ocean. LYCÉE FRANÇAIS DE MADRID is affixed to the Northeastern corner of Botswana, and Aim. Succeed. Become More. is in the Indian Ocean. AMERICAN SCHOOL OF GUATEMALA is nowhere near Guatemala, though the sticker is approximately the size of Guatemala. Finally, a Pucci bikini stretches from Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in northern Russia, to Krasnokamensk, Zabaykalsky Krai, a town at the Sino-Russian border. The bikini resembles a conspiracy theorist’s red string—except the points and lines fall short of articulating anything at all.


The reconfiguration of American signifiers fail to conjure the familiarity of home, leaving behind a hollow parody of belonging. The map in Coup indexes the wife’s deteriorating psychological state, followed by Protocol, Reception, and Separatists, which chronicle her diplomatic life abroad and her steady slide into psychosis. In Separatists, the wife has meticulously arranged a collection of items across the titular set of neatly made twin beds, preparing them to be packed in a go-bag. Most items are survival-oriented: a flashlight, a hard hat labelled AMBASSADOR, a whistle, a personal medical record, maps, medications, hydroxychloroquine. Others, less so: a paint-soaked jacket, a crewneck from the American School in Tehran emblazoned with FREEDOM and KNOWLEDGE, and numerous books: Foreign Service Girl, Terrorism: Avoidance and Survival, Life and Love in the Foreign Service, Soviet World Outlook, Family Medical Guide. As she accompanies her husband on international diplomatic missions, her unfulfilled ambitions surface sideways—through compulsive rituals like the futile arrangement of objects. The location of the residence remains unspecified—because it could be any consular residence. Each residence in each country features the same curtains, the same set of twin beds, the same side table, lamp, carpet, and fan. Details are standardized from room to room from country to country—with the exception of a single local artifact: an American indicator of the foreign surroundings, equally a foreign indicator of American dislocation.


*

.


Next, in four highly subjective scenes from the perspective of the wife during her time in the foreign service (c. 1972-1983), we see the walls, cars, clothes, and furniture she once marshaled into orderly, elegant formulations begin to take revenge. A 1982 Chevrolet Cavalier Sedan is parked in front of an unspecified consulate, and the composition is fractured in a starburst pattern—multicolored triangles radiating outwards from a centered focal point. The visual lexicon of the time becomes the conduit through which her psychosis manifests, with symptoms aestheticized through optical tricks and stylized distortions like this. In another scene, a 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood adorned with miniature American and El Salvadoran flags hovering above the headlights is parked at an airplane tarmac. The scene captures a quieter internal moment of struggle against herself: the composition ripples delicately and diagonally as San Salvador, not the city she once dreamed of living in, becomes the site and subject of her disillusionment. She prepares to fly elsewhere, in hopes that the next destination might fulfill her fantasies—offering an escape from reality and herself. The force of her psychosis continues to confuse boundaries between her unreal reality and the world as it is. The more the wife tries to fit her environment to her worldview, the more distorted her reality grows.


Her hallucinations spill outwards, merging with her surroundings until indistinguishable from them—as when an office in an embassy morphs into two offices in two embassies. There are two wooden executive desks, two upholstered chairs, two typewriters, two radios, two telephones, two lamps, and two rugs. An office in London and another in Tangier meet at a UN flag in the middle—as if to unite the two countries and fracture the wife’s vision. The spatial doubling recalls Separatists, where one location stands in for many, but here, that indexical ambiguity is replaced by multiple spaces in a singular field of vision. A portrait is hung on the curtain, a trash can dissolves into a carpet, and the London cityscape is enclosed by the rigid geometry of the office. Spatial differentiation and rules of perspective collapse in the wife’s desperate effort to replicate structure as it dissolves. In Jakarta, the wife stands before an opulent fountain and façade outside the American embassy. She does not see the barren expanse of concrete stretching on either side of the heavily stylized structures. What she sees is water spewing in the sunlight, dizzying shimmers of color splashing across the fountain and façade. Confetti everywhere, rainbow everything. Star-spangled vision. Ripples, flickers, flares. Objects and images without material form, monuments replicating and dissolving. We are witnessing the wife’s transient ischemic attack. The extravagant atmosphere suggests her oblivion to her own illness; she is lost in a world more vivid than reality, where symptoms become spectacle.


*

.


Finally, three linen-covered panels are labeled 1968, 1977, and 1986, respectively. Drawings are pinned across their surfaces, with subject matter repeating from panel to panel, decade to decade, mood to mood. The 1968 panel offers an interior design sketch of the wife’s Study at Winfield House in London—her dream posting—alongside faux embassy letterhead reads Embassy of the United States of America, Prague, Czechoslovakia, another city where she’d also be happy to live. By 1977, the fantasy contracts, and the letterhead reads Embassy of the United States of America, Bogotá, Colombia. Its 1989 version chronicles the embassies she has actually been stationed: not the UK nor Czechoslovakia but the USSR, Bahrain, Germany, Belgium, Burma, and Guyana.


On an advertisement for the Overseas Diplomatic and Consular Buildings from the Office of Foreign Buildings, the wife has inscribed BE MY VALENTINE and HOME SWEET HOME. She visualizes the phrase in 1977 when she longingly draws her home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. One such drawing converts her husband’s office into a nursery, another depicts large American flags stationed in her real or imagined son’s bedroom—a nod to the diplomatic career she envisions for him, and never had herself. A 1968 drawing of an unrealized American embassy in Bangkok celebrates modern architecture in technicolor. Eleven years later, the wife vandalized that drawing of the Bangkok building with a devil and an explosion. In its final iteration, a romantic watercolor of the never-built Bangkok embassy features a skylight which casts soft pink light across a polished floor—a dream deferred.


Deferred at least until the 80s, when the wife returns home, if she ever left. The drawings she made before she left and once back home resemble each other, and the dog was always in this affluent American suburb—never in Russia, never in Madagascar. Much like Consular Residence or the Affluent American Suburb, the wife is also any or many wives, and her life abroad a careful choreography of sameness. The wives remain absent from the composition and unnamed, and the sole signifer of their subjectivity and psychosis is this place called home.


Cynthia Talmadge (b. 1989) lives and works in New York, NY.



Works cited


Marc Selwyn
Los Angeles, CA
December 12, 2024