Rachel Dohner and Olivia Comai create their queer domestic utopia in Little Pink House (2024), a mixed media installation centering an imagined lesbian household lifestyle that draws inspiration directly from their real lives. The installation plays with scale: ranging from a 1:24 scale model exterior of a candy-colored Victorian gingerbread cottage, to larger-than-life projections of what goes on in their imagined house. This project pulls from everyday moments of lesbian domesticity and intimacy, moments that usually are not seen publicly, or are portrayed through a fetishized male-gazing view. Recreating real actions from their lives pulls the imagined location into a place halfway between pretend and reality, where the rules of regular life don’t apply––this is their world. With this project, Dohner and Comai emphasize the importance of curating a home environment that provides an escape from the constant performance of living in a heteronormative world. How do queer people transform their surroundings to build realities that are softer, safer, and focused on radical joy? At a time when owning a home is becoming more and more of a luxury, especially for young queer people, creating an imagined dream home at a miniature scale allows Comai, Dohner, and the viewers to step momentarily into another world that they can always come back to through memory. Little Pink House emphasizes the physicality of living queerly, and the comfort and confidence that comes from creating your own home-scape.

Featuring tiny artwork by: Caterina DeRousse @caterinaderousse Sophie Haviland @5ophie__ Ray Madrigal @pretentiouskid Alex Basler @alex__basler Amy Pearl Lang @amy.p.lang Callie Frautschi @oatmilkupcharge Amy Huske @amyhuskegenius Olivia Comai @officialoliviacomai Grace Kellison @grapekell.i Rachel Dohner @feltgirlworld Araceli Zuniga @thisisnotaraceli

2nd Place Winner at Elgin Short Film Festival 2024

Made from repurposed fabric scraps, old clothes, thrifted textiles, and found objects, Dohner uses quilts as physical databases––analog computers made of material memory. She is especially interested in interaction and tactility, pieces that must be touched, moved, and played with. Much of Dohner's quilt-based work, such as bliss, How To Kiss, and DRESS ME UP! focus on corners of the internet she traversed as a young person discovering her lesbian identity. This work about the internet is tactile, made with shiny things, special things, things that are especially physical, and she wants her work to bring the Internet into this touchable world. The fleeting flatness of online experience is frightening; reinterpreting it through a craft-centered lens allows Dohner to decontextualize it from its original condition so that she can consider the space critically and reimagine it. The slowness of labor-intensive practices like quilting directly contrasts with the sickening speed of online life, and these craft-based mediums which have historically been labeled as ‘women’s work’ push against a male-dominated internet space. With these materials, Dohner is refashioning the Internet into a place that is fantastical, tangible, and cannot be contained by heteronormativity.

Lady Corn (2024) is a large scale outdoor installation created by Rachel Dohner and Olivia Comai for Wormfarm Institute's 2024 Farm/Art DTour, a 2 week, 50 mile self guided art and agriculture tour in Sauk County, Wisconsin. The magical mirage of Lady Corn can be viewed and interacted with from a multitude of perspectives, providing a sense of movement for the viewer, from observer to participant, and self discovery stemming from performance. Dohner and Comai mirror the experience of learning how systems function through investigation, exploration, and curiosity, especially as this relates to the food production industry. Lady Corn offers visitors a spot to rest, explore, and play in nature, removed from capitalist ideas of productivity. The installation is a literal and figurative doorway into imagining midwestern landscapes through a lens of magical realism.

Dohner and Comai want to see more lesbians represented in the large scale fabrication art world. They hope to expand outside that box of the femme “Mother Earth” figure, and create a playful and curious figure that represents a wider audience, instead of one imagined by a voyeuristic male gaze. Rather, Lady Corn is a reflection of a home filled with self respect and radical joy. Lady Corn provides a space that queers the image of midwestern farming, so that we can give ourselves the permission to perform, relax, and reflect. 

On view for Farm/Art DTour 2024, October 5th-14th

LULLABY (2021) by Olivia Comai is a video exploring shared experiences of sleep. Comai collected surveys from 30 people in order to compose a narrative that follows the whimsical, seductive, and disturbing aspects of how all of these moments are sometimes desirable and often allusive. Comai hopes to create tension with the themes of abjection versus attraction, the fear of losing sleep versus the fear of being asleep, and humor versus melancholy. With this tension, Comai invokes a world of nonsense. Sock Gwen and Sock Dad are the manifestations of their child-like and dream selves, free of prohibition and free to play with the grotesqueness of food. The outdoor scenes snap the viewer back into a false and haunting reality, but also play with the campy qualities of fake gore and low quality horror film. She wrote out the captions in order to put emphasis on the lyrics as well as to play with childlike aesthetics of markers in relation to video.

Miniatures and sets designed and created by Rachel Dohner for Little Pink House (stop motion video),CHECK ME OUT!!! (installation), MOPS (stop motion video), and Spooky Scary Room (installation).

Tag Someone Who Needs to File Their Nails (2022) inspired the setting for Little Pink House. Illustrated and framed by Olivia Comai, the vibrant acrylic clash with the shiny, fleeting nature of mechanical pencil to create a visual representation of Comai's lesbian utopia of domesticity and acts of love.