Beauty is a Basic Service by Georgia Paige Welch // Winter 2022

Beauty is a Basic Service* is a series of portraits painted between 2019-2022, enshrined against a backdrop of handmade wallpaper. The installation maps out relationships and roles that make up a nuclear family by arranging its subjects in a decorated, domestic environment. Taking autobiography as its starting point, Beauty is a Basic Service contends with how the devalued, invisible labor of creating beauty is fundamental to holding the family system together.

The three portraits of my immediate family members underscore how interdependence and detachment can occur simultaneously in a family. The distinct painterly styles and color schemes lend each person singularity. With gazes cast in different directions, away from each other and the viewer, they seem absorbed in their own interiority and moods. Even though the figures feel distant from one another, at arm’s length, they are also firmly entwined by the pattern of the wallpaper. They remain a unit because the triangulation of man, woman, and child is an overpowering symbol of the nuclear family as a moral good. Centering the child, flanked by her parents, tells a story of where the family’s values, roles, and (dis)connections lie.

The portraits live in a curated space that feels as unstable as it is oppressive. The family is suspended from a printed scaffolding of Chinese Wisteria, which carries conflicting connotations of delicacy, intoxicating smell, the US south, and choking invasiveness. Color relationships introduce another narrative layer; a thin crevice of orange behind the monochrome wallpaper fractures the installation while also stitching its subjects together. The wall, standing slightly apart from the structure of the storage unit, gives the impression of a set where actors take their places.

Claiming that “beauty is a basic service” in this artwork leads to the questions: What service does beauty provide? Who provides it? Personally, in my own roles as a good-enough-mother and approximate wife, I have found beauty to be a generational legacy of necessary labor. I have known it as a tether, refuge, performance, gift, religion, chore, and aspiration—all striving to stabilize a family on uncertain ground.

*This claim has been made by Robert Earl Paige, characterizing his own mission as an artist, and by Theaster Gates, summarizing the philosophy behind his neighborhood revitalization projects in Chicago.