reintroduction

In 1999 a friend’s family sold their house and moved to Cleveland. They had the biggest house, the best games, and the most junk food. They had given us full reign of the basement, which had its own entrance and opened onto a swimming pool. My friends and I literally lived in that basement and I get the feeling my mom is still secretly hurt by the amount of time I spent there. The night after they moved some friends and I snuck into the empty house with sleeping bags for one last night, stubbornly holding onto our time there. The house was completely empty. Every surface was scrubbed clean for the next family to start fresh. But as we lay there talking and laughing the empty space was filled by our conversations and memories. Through my work I have tried to do the same, to create a presence in empty space, to show traces that imply action, and make things that are felt more than seen.

A house is an enclosed space, separating inside and outside, providing shelter, comfort and storage. But my home is more ambiguous. It requires a spatial freedom, feeling needed by others, and a comfort of existing without pretense. Home is spoken of spatially but its structure is made of people, knowledge, and memory as well as space. When I move, my sense of home is damaged but not destroyed. I am still connected to distant homes through telecommunication and I can build new connections through shared language, interest and history. Geography was easy to ignore, but I think a sense of home requires the passage of time. Without my past experiences I have only the initial, static definition of a house.

I’m now questioning the role that iconography of the house will take in visualizing my sense of home, as a spatially defined identity. My other, larger challenge is to reveal more of myself in my work. I find myself circling back to the initial question: “what details of my life do I reveal?” This obstruction is the most unsettling. My work is autobiographical, but when I hear the word “confessional”, Tracy Emins tent assaults me like a nightmare! The modernist aesthetic is an attractive shield but is often just as exclusionary. How does an artist balance being revealing without sensationalizing or being presumptuous?