Homesickness and Other Endeavors
Homesickness and Other Endeavors
Installation: life casts, sculptural elements, audio projection, paper cranes, and linens
2014
Eric Fischl Gallery - Phoenix, AZ
What is the average weight of a life? What kind of scale weighs the absence of your mother’s voice, your father’s embrace? When a moment is remembered for the last time does it cease to exist? There is physical death and then there is death of memory.
Homesickness and other Endeavors explores the first language (gesture) and the last language (memory).
The language of the body is gesture. In fact, language is thought to have evolved from manual gestures. Gesture is not limited to the body or even movement but can also be used to describe the state of an object. Upon seeing a sunken couch, or a worn table, one can begin to read the visual language of used things. Perhaps the objects speak of comfortability or loneliness, time passing or time arrested. My work is informed by gesture, its connection to intention and its ability to echo these larger patterns of life. The language of the mind is memory. It can be manipulated, shared with others, changed over time and eventually, lost.
In order to examine gesture and memory, I selected subject matter of a common and routine home life. Family dynamics produce familiar and borderless themes: communication, trust, love, longing and contempt. I understand myself by examining my past and where I come from, not in a geographical or cultural sense, but in encompassing and universal ways. I ask questions that force me to wade through my own memory– How is it to be small, to be old, to be a spectator…to watch life pass through my hands? I collect and remake objects in order to visualize a memory, a visual investigation into the narrative of my life, of many lives.