Showing Pecchio’s Habitation series alongside Laughlin’s works based on design magazines reveals strikingly similar themes and aesthetics, though the artists are working separately and in different mediums. The dialogue created between these works further enriches them, drawing visitors into a new conversation about the variations of depicting domestic interiors and the underlying tensions in such imaginings.

Pecchio and Laughlin are both interested in the role that domestic spaces play in our lives, but each artist takes a unique approach. Pecchio focuses her lens on objects and dynamics of living areas—the comfortable understanding between a body and a home and the everyday residue of living that we leave in our wake. In contrast Laughlin’s paintings, largely drawn from a series titled Magazine Interiors, examine the idealized décor and arrangement of spaces shown in popular shelter magazines such as Architectural Digest and Dwell. Both artists are analyzing, dissecting, and reconsidering the elements of everyday living, but the objects and spaces in these images are not only the physical components of our domestic surroundings. Instead, they become intimate symbols of our existence, markers of our territory, and recorders of our history.

Organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. Support provided by the George Smedes Poyner Family Foundation and SunTrust Foundation. This exhibition is also made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources; the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.; and the William R. Kenan Jr. Endowment for Educational Exhibitions.