Domestic Ideals: Nostalgia and the Home
Co-curated by: Yan Gi Cheng and Peter Gynd
Co-curated by: Yan Gi Cheng and Peter Gynd
Opening Reception: February 8, 2015 6-8pm
Performance: February 22, 4pm. Katya Grokhovsky performing House play
Featuring:
“The reality of the building does not consist in the roof and walls but the space within to be lived in”
-Lao Tse
The home is more than a building, it forms a corporeal arena from which the body, no matter how transitory, can experience tangible emotional sustenance. We unpack ourselves into the interior spaces of our homes and link our identities to its geography. As was stated in Bachelards book ‘Poetics of Space’, the home is an imaginary realm in which architectural structures are metaphors of emotional states defining selfhood. Home thus not only embodies the broader contextual realities of a physical domestic space, but also serves to represent and express our experiences and define our memories.
The work brought together in this exhibition presents a narrative of Home as seen through a lens of our physical and metaphorical connection to a space. The eight artists presented: A-CHAN, Katya Grokhovsky, Reuven Israel, Joan Linder, Paul Loughney, Melissa Murray, Ryan Sarah Murphy, and Marcie Revens, engage this theme through examining the culturally central role the home plays as staging ground in economic forces and gender relations, and the defining role which domestic space plays in the cognitive relationship we have with our bodies.
These works present and explore domesticity not only within the confines of an architectural structure and the constitutions of that space, but also through the geopolitics which define ones belonging to a given city, social group or nation. Each artist thereby unveils the psychological and physical adherence the body has to the materiality of domestic space, while simultaneously drawing on the connections and dislocations the home has with ones memory of it.