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. The chapter traces the development of this shift, beginning with Hard Work, proceeding to Strings, Things, and Pictures, and focusing on three works from 2000: Shrink, Josephine, and Theresa. Pepe’s early work with the Doppelgangers provided a mechanism for identity exploration based on radical otherness and alterity. Hard Work featured video and multiple installed objects and wall drawings spread across the octagonal Lee Gallery within the small but prestigious museum on Brandeis University’s campus.
