What Did You Expect by Georgia Paige Welch // Spring 2023

What Did You Expect is a performance and text-based installation about expanding possibilities in the aftermath of breakdown. With friends and collaborators,* I dismantled my preexisting installation—portraits on an ornate backdrop, about the role of beauty in sustaining the nuclear family—then transformed the same elements into a new piece of site specific artwork. 

Beauty is A Basic Service was marked by seams fracturing an otherwise tight knit composition; these fissures became the starting point for What Did You Expect. We  took down the paintings and pried pieces of wallpaper apart to reveal a vivid orange wall and multicolored motifs on the reverse side of the monochrome wallpaper. Participants formed a loose assembly line, screen printing phrases onto each side of the panels, hanging them to dry in the hallway, and pinning them back up on the wall. As a collective undertaking the event consciously departed from the original installation’s emphasis on the isolation of invisible gendered labor in the family. 

In the final product of What Did You Expect, the screen printed phrases are conversational modes of address that allude to some unspecified assumption and the way we measure our experiences against preexisting hopes and fears. What was once a uniform backdrop is now cut up by jumps in color, alignment, and text that continuously push the viewer’s eye to make comparisons. With no logical place left to reside on the busy wall, the family members’ portraits were disbanded from their trinity and placed into a new set of relationships throughout the space. A small adjustment (printing C’s over W’s) created a key change in the text’s meaning, to evoke optimism that comes from believing in potential beyond what our own minds can conjure.

What Did You Expect took the tensions, both visual and conceptual, embedded in one artwork and magnified them until they gave way to an alternate, more porous vision of creativity, labor, and family ties. This reconfiguration suggests that destabilizing our closely held reference points—of what we expect, think, or imagine—is necessary to move through disappointment, failure, and collapse. What happens when we let our expectations break, and discover that even our imaginations are limited?

*Thanks to everyone who contributed, especially Brie, Matt, Mimi, and Navya.