My Wife Print

from $25.00
I wanted to make a painting about “I hate my wife” jokes and ended up reflecting on my own feelings about marriage. What’s the truth behind the joke? With social media, you can know the ins and outs of a million random strangers’ relationship drama. Better yet, everyone gets to weigh in and treat it like a spectator sport. “My husband hates me” is practically its own genre of TikTok content, where women share the rude, disrespectful, or abusive things their partners do and everyone debates their relationship in the comments. A lot of the time, women are shamed for not leaving their obviously terrible partners. While I agree that no one should tolerate that behavior, I sometimes question how helpful the comment section actually is. The suburbs represent an American fantasy of success, but I’ve always found them eerie. Paranoid individualism can make them feel lonely and plastic, but they’re also where I grew up. In this painting, I play with the bumbling husband and housewife tropes while leaving clues about what might really be going on in the shadows. Sitcoms and slashers are both set in suburbia, and that’s a line I like to hopscotch between in my work. True crime has also become more influential in my art recently. I watched The Pastor’s Wife documentary while making this, and it played out like so many cases I’ve seen before: a woman begs for help and doesn’t receive it until she’s dead. Abuse is almost never a black and white scenario with perfectly clear moral sides. People have a hard time understanding the complexities of abusive relationships, especially when the victim isn’t perfect. Trials and abuse allegations becoming social media spectacles can have real consequences for victims and for the way we understand abuse more broadly. I’m interested in that uncomfortable space between joke and threat, sitcom and slasher, picture perfect marriage and whatever might be happening behind closed doors.
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I wanted to make a painting about “I hate my wife” jokes and ended up reflecting on my own feelings about marriage. What’s the truth behind the joke? With social media, you can know the ins and outs of a million random strangers’ relationship drama. Better yet, everyone gets to weigh in and treat it like a spectator sport. “My husband hates me” is practically its own genre of TikTok content, where women share the rude, disrespectful, or abusive things their partners do and everyone debates their relationship in the comments. A lot of the time, women are shamed for not leaving their obviously terrible partners. While I agree that no one should tolerate that behavior, I sometimes question how helpful the comment section actually is. The suburbs represent an American fantasy of success, but I’ve always found them eerie. Paranoid individualism can make them feel lonely and plastic, but they’re also where I grew up. In this painting, I play with the bumbling husband and housewife tropes while leaving clues about what might really be going on in the shadows. Sitcoms and slashers are both set in suburbia, and that’s a line I like to hopscotch between in my work. True crime has also become more influential in my art recently. I watched The Pastor’s Wife documentary while making this, and it played out like so many cases I’ve seen before: a woman begs for help and doesn’t receive it until she’s dead. Abuse is almost never a black and white scenario with perfectly clear moral sides. People have a hard time understanding the complexities of abusive relationships, especially when the victim isn’t perfect. Trials and abuse allegations becoming social media spectacles can have real consequences for victims and for the way we understand abuse more broadly. I’m interested in that uncomfortable space between joke and threat, sitcom and slasher, picture perfect marriage and whatever might be happening behind closed doors.