Little Pink House (Drawing)

Olivia Comai is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago who works with puppets, painting, print media, drawing, video, and performance. Comai makes little airplane noises as she buzzes her spoonfuls of nostalgia down the gullets of her audience, using this ease to make her work accessible to all generations, and to those outside of the capital-A Art world. She uses humor, puppets, music, and other colorful visual art to make complex topics such as lesbian identities, isolation, and loss more digestible for a wider audience. She firmly believes in the integration of play with art. She weaves in this playfulness both materially through Mr. Sketch scented markers, as well as conceptually in her juxtaposition between Muppets from memory and their mortality. Comai received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Summer of 2021. Most recently her work has been featured at Side Street Studio Arts and in the Elgin Short Film Festival (Elgin, IL), Wormfarm Institute (Reedsburg, WI), Mayfield (Chicago, IL), Purple Window Gallery (Chicago, IL), the Comfort Station (Chicago, IL) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Galleries (Chicago, IL). <a href="//instagram.com/officialoliviacomai" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" data-link-auto="" target="_blank">instagram.com/officialoliviacomai</a>Rachel E Dohner is a Chicago-born artist who works in fibers, sculpture, furniture, video, and designed objects. No matter the medium, tactility is essential—Dohner makes things that want to be touched, things that beg to be played with. Her work springs from intricate stories, thorough research, and the uncontrollable urge to make her inner world tangible. Inspired by camp, lesbian coming of age, and the World Wide Web, Rachel's work is made to play with the shape of everyday life––to miniaturize it, to warp it, to personify its objects. She uses maximalist materiality to transfix viewers, to draw them into her imagined world and always keep it in the back of their minds, even when they leave. She holds a BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and has shown work recently with Side Street Studio Arts and in the Elgin Short Film Festival (Elgin, IL), Wormfarm Institute (Reedsburg, WI), Fulton Street Collective (Chicago, IL), The Comfort Station (Chicago, IL) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Galleries (Chicago, IL). <a href="//racheldohner.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" data-link-auto="" target="_blank">racheldohner.com</a> <a href="//instagram.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" data-link-auto="" target="_blank">instagram.com/</a>

About Us

The project will center around the development of a short episodic stop-motion series that explores the collective memories of lesbian coming of age, using the internet as a tool for self discovery. &nbsp;When there is no one we can ask our most intimate questions, we ask the internet––how to kiss, how to know if I’m gay––because typing is so much easier than saying things out loud. And much of the time, the content that we are consuming is not made for the queer and lesbian community, but about us, made by and for a male-gazing crowd. The series will explore not only how queer youth interact with and twist online media to make it relevant to our burgeoning identities, but also how it feels to reflect back upon these digital worlds as an adult, living a life that a young closeted girl could only dream of. The series follow a 20-something girl as she gets sucked into her computer and guided through her internet history by the personified cursor, Mousey. He’s the one who pulled her inside the computer and only he can let her out, but first she has to relive the computer history of her sexual awakening and the tools she used to do that (online tutorials and quizzes, old text messages, porn, photos of herself, etc) . . . And also figure out why Mousey brought her into computerworld in the first place. Each episode explores a different moment in her internet history. As the episodes go on, Mousey also starts pulling out memories from her mind.&nbsp;The physicality of computerworld is essential to the story––this world plays by different rules than our own. Computerworld is fun, funny, and fuzzy. The initial setting of the world is Bliss, the utopian grassy hilltop popularized as the default Windows desktop, but the world is vast, and is arranged in arbitrary ways: file folders float in the sky like clouds, video clips are acted out as plays on stage, search history takes physical form as a grocery store, with each search a grocery item that must be 'checked out' to be revisited. Computerworld takes the flatness of the real internet, turns it inside out, and stitches it together, making it weird, wonderful, and incredibly touchable. A majority of the clips will be stop motion animation, emphasizing this tactility, but other mediums (puppets, drawn animation, previous quilt works, videos) will be mixed in, mimicking the frenetic collage of internet space.Stop motion animation is incredibly time consuming, so for their 30 day Playbook project, Dohner and Comai will focus on creating puppets, building initial sets, storyboarding, and creating keyframe shots of the first episode that will serve as a stand-alone piece. This will serve as the launchpad for the creation of the series, which will also be accompanied by a gallery show, featuring the video series as well as the physical pieces created. Comai and Dohner have previously collaborated on an animated film, Little Pink House, which they created with a limited budget in two months. One of the joys of stop-motion and miniature making is that it's not expensive to create––most materials used are repurposed, found, or inexpensive. However, time is the most expensive resource––filming a simple five second shot can take hours, filming a one minute clip can take days, and creating the puppets, sets, and props from scratch can take weeks. This grant will allow the artists to properly compensate themselves for their time, focus fully on the project, purchase necessary materials, and rent studio space for filming. It will also allow them to further their skills in production design, stop motion animation, cinematography, screenwriting, editing, and artistic promotion, laying the groundwork for future projects in this medium. Most importantly, this project will create work that speaks personally to the lesbian and queer community, giving viewers an opportunity to connect, discuss, and reflect on the ways that their own online experiences impacted their self discovery.

Building COMPUTERWORLD

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.

LULLABY

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.

Quilts

Previous Work

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.

Tag Someone Who Needs to File Their Nails

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).

Miniatures

Exhibition Examples

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 @thisisnotaraceli2nd Place Winner at Elgin Short Film Festival 2024

Little Pink House

Rachel Dohner and Olivia Comai are artists, collaborators, teachers, and partners based in Chicago, IL. Their practices meet at the intersection of maximalism and play, creating huge and tiny worlds using expansive mediums, including stop motion animation, quilting, sculpture, and puppetry. COMPUTERWORLD is a melding of both of their projects and dreams, manifesting as a series of mixed-media short films that explore the collective digital memories of lesbian coming of age.

Rachel Dohner and Olivia Comai - Imagination Fund Proposal

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.&nbsp;On view for Farm/Art DTour 2024, October 5th-14th

Lady Corn

Rachel Dohner and Olivia Comai are artists, collaborators, teachers, and partners based in Chicago, IL. Their practices meet at the intersection of maximalism and play, creating huge and tiny worlds using expansive mediums, including stop motion animation, quilting, sculpture, and puppetry. COMPUTERWORLD is a melding of both of their projects and dreams, which will manifest as a series of mixed-media short films that explore the collective digital memories of lesbian coming of age.