Cultured Magazine presents Bedroom by Katie Stout
The bedroom is a place where we can find respite and are free from the demands of life. Bedrooms are usually our most personalized rooms, offering comfort through framed family photos and carefully selected duvets. We look at a shelf of unread books and feel whole. It’s a place where we relax and dream. And who knows this better than the teeny-bopper?
To young girls the bedroom is an unmediated space of self-identity, escapism and experimentation. In fact, the bedroom plays such a significant role to girls that the concept of “bedroom culture” emerged in the field of youth culture studies in the 1970s. The feminist sociologists Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber (1976) argued that female youth, referred to as teeny-boppers, develop a “culture of the bedroom” comprizing “experimenting with make-up, listening to records, reading the mags, sizing up the boyfriends, chatting [and] jiving.”
Katie Stout's Bedroom Curio both pokes fun at and finds inspiration in the teeny-bopper character, from her delusions to the products she uses. The furniture objects created for this installation are influenced by the disorienting contradictions and incessant exploration of adolescence; playful but serious, naive but aware. Nothing matters. Everything matters. The room exists in a place between impulse and control with an awareness of the absurd ways in which mass culture tries to dictate female coming of age.