Rose Wylie Lolita’s House

About

Loosely referencing a house that was constructed across the street from Wylie’s residence in Kent, England, in the 1970s in the prevalent style of the period and the neighbor’s teenage daughter who would often wash their car in the driveway, Lolita’s Housecontinues the artist’s ongoing fascination with the shifting nature of memory and the multilayered external associations that become attached to it over time.

In the works on view, Wylie, who still lives and works in the same residence she has occupied for many years, revisits her impressions of that particular time and place several decades on. Her associative reconstructions meld fact and fiction, thus drawing her lived experience into dialogue with a web of external points of reference. As the artist notes, "The image became more potent through the multilayered exploration of how it looked; but any literary association with Nabokov’s Lolita was slight, since it was only her age and frequent visibility paraded through ‘dress’ and ‘on-view performance,’ which gave her the invented name."