COMBINE 2012: Annual Undergraduate Student Exhibition

Helpful Henry’s Guide to Domestic Existence follows a deceptively simple premise—an encounter with a how-to guide gone wrong. In this photo series the viewer is faced with images of Helpful Henry’s attempts at making sense of domestic life. The results of his efforts evidence a certain ineptitude, as a flustered Henry is overwhelmed by the ostensibly uncomplicated demands of self-subsistence in his home. With cartoonish flair, Helpful Henry confronts the absurdity of mundane existence. The selections for the photo display were originally part of another work: a stylized how-to manual featuring 21 images with accompanying text detailing Helpful Henry’s attempts at living a hermetic life. This manual is shown along with the photographs, sealed in a Plexiglas box.

The photo series is composed of five striking black-and-white images, their subject squarely centered and shot in sharp detail, recalling the diagrams of assembly manuals, which use strong geometrical lines that cut through the compositions. The photos represent banal household objects—a radio, a box of tide, a vacuum cleaner—though these everyday artefacts are all somehow broken or out of place, bearing the traces of the anxiety they produced. One image shows a glass of curdled milk and a roughed-up can of beans. The obvious difficulty in opening a can of beans and the unanticipated souring of the milk bear witness to the complexities of trivial daily life: even subsisting off of milk and beans is an ordeal for Helpful Henry.

Another image features a disparaged Henry defeated by the vacuum cleaner, reduced to a mass in the corner, his domestic appendage turned against him. His face is a blur, his frustration obscuring the clarity of an otherwise crisp photo series. Similarly, in the other image in which Helpful Henry is featured, we catch only his distrustful gaze, peering out at us from a chest of drawers. Helpful Henry never allows himself to be fully accessed by the viewer; his identity remains elusive.

The ultimate irony of this series is the solipsistic nature of the hermetic how-to manual, as Helpful Henry instructs an audience on how to avoid the external world. The format of an instruction manual presupposes a reader, but the author is too lost in existential dread to confront others. Our “helpful” guide instead blunders through even the simplest task, perplexed by the absurdity of supposedly self-evident household procedures. Pontarini’s satiric take on the how-to guide is conspicuously steeped in existential concerns. In the end, it leaves the viewer amused and uneasy, offering an encounter with domestic life that is both familiar and unsettling.