"While looking through my family archive, I came across a photo of my mother holding a tropical flower while on vacation in Hawaii on her honeymoon. The image mesmerized me in a way that was similar to Roland Barthes and his famous winter garden photograph. This photograph has a special quality to it, it’s an image that feels quite familiar and universal, an image of an idealized form of womanhood. It seemed to me that the image was not only of my mother, but a document of what society deems as feminine beauty in a multitude of ways. This photo has become the starting ground for this project, as I feel it has sparked a need within me to understand how images like this can act as references to idealized femininity."  -Candace Cosentino

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     House or Home presents a formal inquiry into Candace Cosentino’s fascination and disturbance of the associations created between women, delicacy and passivity. By utilizing the photographic medium and the female form, she taps back into a state of childish make-believe through her life-sized imagery to maneuver around Western ideals. Each image exists in spaces that are remnant of universal experiences of the domestic, expressing relationships between identity, physicality and place. Each environment being remnant of universal experiences of the concept of domestic space and outgrown ideals which remain present impactful influences on female identity today. A presence elevated, yet denunciated.  portraiture.