Cramped motel rooms are nothing if not geometric, and Babin points her camera to take full advantage of their lines and volumes. The tidy bed makes a low contrasting horizon, occupying the entire foreground. This one's bed has been rumpled already, its pink and blue bedspread disturbed either by a weary driver or an eager lothario. Again, the bed is the horizontal base for the picture, its long line echoed in a low Danish modern desk with battered chair. Then there's a teal-blue curtain, an air conditioning unit, a lamp dangling from a gold chain, a door ajar.
Abstraction allows for compositional purity.
Wrapped in tasteless brown Naugahide, the bucket sits on a faux-wood dresser top, alongside a glistening glass, both of them reflected in an adjoining mirror. But she pushes these homely things into daring diagonals, deeply pigmented in brown, white and shine. Babin deftly contrasts the fine cold light of the outdoors with the warm fakey light of the motel interiors, bathing the rooms by turn in blue, then yellow. A few of the rooms are already clearly occupied, sullied with the kind of human baggage that messes up motel rooms from the instant of occupancy. Shot through with Babin's wonderful light, these tacky little rooms become emblems of redemption.