Through her photography and film works, Elisabeth Hogeman, MFA’16, a lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts, examines our relationship to domestic spaces. In the ongoing series Vanities, she assembles collages from luxury home décor magazines and catalogs—fantasies of interiors she found herself turning to in her daily life—adds physical materials like glass, and then photographs the pieces for digital editing.

Each piece has a mirror at its center. When she began the project around 2020, Hogeman gave these mirrors the shape of caskets; today they take the shape of a stringed instrument, a lemon, an oyster—playful echoes of the 17th-century Dutch vanitas tradition. Those still-life paintings contained symbols of wealth, the arts, and the passage of time. They aimed to remind viewers of the inevitability of death and the unimportance of worldly things. In revisiting the tradition, Hogeman explores a tension in her identity as an artist: she is a critic of the visual world, but she is also a consumer, tempted and influenced by idealized images.—C. C.