CROSSING THE THRESHOLD: THE DOMESTIC HOUSE/HOME AS A SITE FOR CONTEMPORARY IRISH ART INSTALLATIONS Jane Humphries Abstract A variety of artist led initiatives began to utilize domestic spaces as exhibition venues in Ireland from early 2000. Responding to the construction boom and other factors born from cultural changes triggered by the Celtic Tiger many of these projects occurred in marginalized urban communities. By deliberately working outside the institutional gallery space and engaging with everyday life, artists contested the legacy of the modernist white cube space and all its inherited historiography. This paper argues that this was a new phenomenon in Irish art practice. How the historical context, location and site specificity impacted on the intention and reception of the works exhibited, will be considered within a particular case study Superbia. This installation project was part of the Breaking Ground percent for art programme for Ballymun Regeneration Limited, launched by the government in a socially disadvantaged area of Dublin in February 2002. It is proposed that Superbia presented itself as a novel space in Irish art practice as it evolved into a ‘domestic third space’ primarily because it was ‘housed’ in a suburban family home. It thus traversed a number of intersections such as inside/outside space, the local and the global, the house as a commodity or as a site of human relationships, art life and everyday life. In particular, the contestations and subversions of gendered spatiality will be explored. How the artists involved (re)imagined what is traditionally defined as the feminine, invisible, private space of the house/home into a visible public site of the domestic everyday is framed within Barcha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s ideas of the ‘Matrix’. Playing on the multiple meanings within the title of the exhibition, from both the banal to the exotic, Superbia, thus represented a site of liminality, a threshold space of encounter where multiple readings of ‘home’ ‘gender’ and ‘Irishness’ occurred. ART, IRISH, DOMESTIC, HOME, PLACE, SPACE, EVERYDAY, GENDER, IDENTITY *****