installations & performances

Radio Silence, The Project Space, F.A.T. Village, 2019

FOLD: The Night’s Wind

Lemeh_FOLD_The NIght's Wind 2018

This art experience is designed to be collaborative in nature. FOLD: The Night’s Wind, is an open invitation for viewers to respond (in writing) to the content (video, historical documents, images and memorabilia) located in the installation.

Above is an excerpt from the video, FOLD: The Night’s Wind. This video serves as a component of the installation. Other items that appeared in the installation are bed sheets, baskets, books, documents, papers, birdcages with framed images, clothes pins, clothes line, ironing boards & artificial wind.

***FOLD: Iron Maidens’ Installation* with photographic series, *Iron Ladies, 2019***

Video, photographs, sound, dresses, clock, mirrors, metal basins, ironing boards, birdcage, turf, fabric, text & artificial wind

08 Lemeh Iron Ladies Wash Day 5 Revelation 2018

Dorotha Lemeh, Iron Ladies (Day 1 – 5 photographs) 18 x24″ each (18″ x 102″)

“By ten you’d be trained—our people was seeing to that. You was thought to be ‘bout grown as far as your training. Especially a girl. Your training was early and hard. No girl I know wasn’t training for work out by ten. From the time a girl can stand—she’s being made to work. Girls are started early with work—no play ever for a girl. That’s just how they [adult females] was on girls. Work, work, work. No play, ‘cause they told you, ‘Life was to be hardest on you—always.’” Pernella Ross in God and They People: The Rural South in Living In, Living Out by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, chpt. 1, 42.

FOLD: Iron Maidens (Ladies) – Installation: Video, photographs, sound, dresses, clock, mirrors, metal basins, ironing boards, birdcage, turf, fabric, text & artificial wind

For women of color, specifically African Americans, whose freedom was established in the short parameters of less than 100 years after the civil war, the introduction of the Industrial Age led to many being engaged as hired help and live-in domestic service workers. Black domestics (cooks, launders, seamstress, etc.) barely made a living wage, $3.50 a week. Such practices did not go unnoticed and eventually during the New Deal Era things began to change. Unfortunately, unequal pay still exists today for many women.