Katya Pronin
Refuge
Public lives in New York City are carried on in close proximity. New Yorkers’ sense of personal space and their public identities are rigorously maintained, challenged daily. For many of us, it is the personal space afforded to us in our bathrooms and showers that provides the much-needed reprieve. These spaces have a transformative quality: changing our focus, mentally; letting us be ourselves in a way that feels sincere and yet infrequent. Here, we remember who we are.
In these unprotected moments of asylum, our most curtained habits and body-mind states are revealed. Here, make-up runs and thoughts submerge, and bare skin fumbles with tile and porcelain and metal. Our soap slips, our skin wrinkles, and razors ride gently over the surfaces we hide when we leave. The shower is hardly a unique space, but each body fills it differently, feels differently in it - the space expands in the bather's watery trance.
