A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN A PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION BY SHAE CAMARDO

Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own “a woman must have money and a room if she is to write fiction.” While this exhibition seems initially unrelated to the quote- as the focus of the exhibit is not my writing nor anything fictitious- I seek to emphasize the creative necessity and privilege of having a space of one’s own where a woman can gather her thoughts, things, and self, uninterrupted.

I am privileged to have one of these spaces. My bedroom has long been my Eden- a place filled to the brim, not out of a compulsion to hoard, but out of a desire to love my possessions maximally. I recognized from an early age that the objects that people hold constitutionally do not stand a chance against the world’s vastness. Many of them are distractions, sentenced to the same ephemerality as everything else. However, in a world where everything is already too small, passionately indulging is not decadent, but rather necessary to maintain roots. My bedroom is a manifestation of this notion.

This show features a maximalist bedroom containing portraits of the people and possessions that shaped my creative world. Thus my room is not just a space, but a memory archive.

-Shae Camardo