ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a subjective crisis that erupts in Sheila Pepe’s most significant installations dating from 1996 to 2000. During this period, Pepe’s work exhibits a shift in the understanding of the artist’s embodied subjective experience of making art, of the viewer’s embodied subjective experience of art going, and in the role of repetition in establishing these subjectivities—shifts that parallel developments in the philosophy of affect. In the previous chapter, I argued that in her Doppelgänger work, Pepe deployed a “philosophy of the two” as a feminist exposure of the subject–object binary that undergirds hegemonic patriarchy. In this chapter, I show how this strategy begins to proliferate, giving way to a more complex ontology of affect. Moving from a philosophy of the two to a philosophy of multiplicity, Pepe’s work forsakes the earlier model for a sprawling, unwieldy practice that typifies her output even today. This chapter will trace the development of this shift, beginning with Hard Work (1996), proceeding to Strings, Things, and Pictures (1999), and focusing on three works from 2000: Shrink, Josephine, and Theresa.
