Taking what is familiar and camouflaging it, I am purposefully defamiliarizing the world by looking to confuse or to conflate many things into one. The hooded hole is a guillotine is a confessional is an interrogation device. It is all of these things in part but it is also in a state of becoming something new: What really happens if there is a hole in the wall and you can stick your head in it? This vanishing of the real necessitates a restructuring of understanding.

My artwork begins as participatory sets that I design with a particular choreography in mind. Drawn from ordinary situations thrown out of balance, photographs and videos of these spaces are not illustrations of the objects. Rather, they achieve a distance that is that of voyeurism and of surveillance, both near and far, a creation of witness. Through sculptural environments, performance, photography, and video, I create non-linear worlds that persist in semantic obscurity.

Madeleine Bailey lives and works in Chicago, IL.