Inappropriate Behaviour was exhibited in a solo exhibition at Galerie La Centrale Powerhouse, Montréal, Québec, Canada. The project was supported by a British Council Canada Visual Arts Professional Exchange Grant. The work was produced as part of a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Studentship based in the Department of Architecture at McGill University in Montréal, Canada

Inappropriate Behaviour

Inappropriate Behaviour is an architectural fiction, a room installed in a building formerly devoted to the storage and distribution of animal skins, fur coats, hats and gloves in the Downtown area of Montréal. Here, found and made furniture, linens and photographs, piles of pepper and lavender and an ornate, curiously calibrated sequence of wall mirrors depict a familiar narrative, a moment of fracture in the apparently benign surroundings of polite society. Borrowing from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) and closely allied to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865), the work centres on the architectural evocation of reason, order, good government and the established hierarchies. It depicts the moment when this breaks down.

Inappropriate Behaviour owes a particular debt to Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières’ “The Genius of Architecture; or, The Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations” (1780)