Celebrities’ Houses at Night: A Projection began with a plot point from the fifth season of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where Will Smith’s character endeavors to make a coffee-table book filled with photos of celebrities’ homes, snapped “drive-by” style from a moving car at night. The fictional book never materialized, but its unrealized concept became the underlying impetus behind this serial investigation into the history of television and broadcasting, from conceptual photography to sitcoms. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air – along with the hardware and larger social apparatus that disseminated it – serves as a readymade point of departure for this broader exploration.
Making good on Will Smith’s promise, Denny commissioned a photographer to take drive-by photos of local Oslo celebrities’ houses at night. He then constructed a series of frames customized to resemble the sleekness of flatscreen TV hardware, with LEDs shining through each photograph from behind. The resulting constructions are hybrid in format: part frame, part monitor, and part projector.
Denny updated the work for subsequent showings, adding new snapshots of local celebrities’ houses to each “screen”, corresponding with the site of each exhibition. Additional photos from new cities are layered on as the works are shown, charting their movement across countries and venues.
For Celebrities’ Houses at Night: A Projection (Bonn), Denny installed the works on top of a wallpaper made from enlarged reproductions taken from two pages from Radical Software, an underground video periodical from the early 1970s. These pages depict, respectively, “TV Stars’ Homes” and “Our TV Sets”, situating the central subjects of Celebrities’ Houses in a longer social and artistic lineage.