House, Hold - Lois Bielefeld
House, Hold is a collaborative body of work created with my wife, Jackie, during shelter-in-place. Together we made a photograph every day for the month of May, looking at how we negotiate home, our roles, and power at this time. Since 2018, I've been collaborating with others on a series called New Domesticity where I've been making photographs of what home looks like in our current day. Unable to continue that work, I turned the camera inward on my own home and examined all that is quirky, vulnerable, and beautiful within our relationship and domestic space. - Lois Bielefeld
May 1: Jackie and Lois tolerate listening to a free audio book for bookclub. They are glad they didn't purchase it.
May 4: Lois and Jackie's 1.5 butt kitchen gets even smaller when Lois leaves all the cabinet doors open. She makes a mean vegan taco regardless.
May 2: Lois cuts Jackie's hair for the first time. It'll do.
May 23: Jackie cuts Lois's hair for the second time. It didn't look like the picture but the mullet wings were abated.
May 10: Mother's day, Jackie learns her parents are both sick. Lois and Jackie look up Covid testing sites in Oak Creek.
May 18: Jackie was 27 years old when she could first heard the sounds of other people chewing food, urine ricocheting off porcelain, and turn signals in the car.
May 20: Lois waits until after Jackie turns off the light to put in her mouthguard.
May 8: Disciplined as always, Jackie modifies her workouts to be done at home. She refuses to overpay for a proper pull-up bar. Price-gougers.
May 21: All this kale will work its way in between two of Lois's upper right molars, which she affectionately calls her kale-hole.
May 24: Lois and Jackie got into a fight about including The Power of Two in the photograph depicting conflict.
May 22: They eventually always come true. If they remember what they wished for.
May 6: Jackie gets ready to work from home, Lois gets ready to cop a feel.
May 11: Jackie and Lois start to read Chapter 5 - Anger as a Stop Sign.
Lois Bielefeld is a series based artist working in photography, audio, video, and installation. Her work continually asks the question of what links routine and ritual to the formation of identity and personhood.
Born in Milwaukee, WI, Lois has lived in Rochester, Brooklyn, Milwaukee again, Oakland, and now she splits her time between Chicago and Los Angeles. Currently, she is working on her MFA (2021) at the California Institute of the Arts. She is a recent empty nester as her daughter attends the University of Minnesota. Besides photography, she feels passionate about traveling, hiking, eating, swimming, and bicycling adventures.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Saint Kate Arts Hotel, and The Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin. Bielefeld has shown at The International Center of Photography in New York City, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, The Charles Allis Art Museum, and Portrait Society Gallery.