Over the years, Aharonovitch has incorporated into her work figures based on herself as a young child and on other members of her own family, in unbridled and humorous displays of provocative candidness and compassion. However, the archetypes of her characters and the relationships within the family are familiar to us all, sometimes painfully so. Her characters – which are replicated and repeated at different places at the same time – are imprisoned in endless internal rituals of bodily and domestic maintenance, in obsessive conditioning, and in varied expressions of fear of death.

In her research preceding the creation of the work, Aharonovitch looked at a great many mechanical clocks from past centuries, of the sort that use mechanized figures. These would pop out and moved along tracks at predetermined intervals, to the surprise and delight of audiences, while relentlessly marking the passage of time as a memento mori – a sobering reminder of mortality. Not surprisingly, the house she has created works like a large clock: every fifteen minutes, a grotesque and bizarre procession of the family members emerges from the door, for the purpose of emptying the garbage that has accumulated inside. Yet the family members’ desire to maintain order and cleanliness is doomed to fail: in short order, the procession pulls all the garbage back into the house.

A closer look at the work reveals a special and somewhat disturbing relationship between the father of the family and his young daughter. Her secret anxieties about the health of her mature father are expressed in their innocuous game of doctor and patient, which they play on the sofa in the living room; in her angry indignation at the will that he is writing on the dining table; and in his depiction as wired up to monitors as he walks within a treadwheel, like a laboratory mouse. The father, for his part, is devoted to his daughter, but at the same time is trying desperately to extend her need for his constant care indefinitely. To this end, he carries her on his back (she convincingly playing the part of a “sack of flour”); trims her nails; and teaches her to shoot birds through the window of the treehouse he has built for her – all so that she might never, heaven forfend, think of growing up and truly leaving the nest, or of expressing her autonomous self and artistic voice.

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