Homemaking is the greatest art.
—George Maciunas
It’s quite telling that we don’t have a real definition of a concept as basic as “home”. With regards to its physical dimension, we know that it is some sort of dwelling beyond our own skin - a haven, a refuge, a sanctuary - but outside of that, everything seems to be up for grabs. The problem is that the sensorial connection with such a dwelling is hard to pin down. Certainly, there is something that is consubstantial with “familiarity” or “safety”; a home might be not only a physical structure, but also the emotional connections and experiences tied to it. However, these characteristics don’t end up exhausting the term. If for many people “home” is the most nurturing and safest of places, somewhere they strive to return to when they are in need of shelter and rest, for others home might be a dreadfully oppressive space (dull, boring, limiting) precisely due to its familiarity, especially if one cannot leave and is confined by it. It is as if the preciousness of the familiar space were directly proportional to the harshness of the world that lies right outside of it. This equation reminds us of the critical distinction that Husserl made a century ago: the limits of the home demarcate a passing from a “familiar world” (Heimwelt) to an “alien word” (Fremdwelt).
The pandemic threw the blurriness of the concept into stark relief. In a matter of a few weeks, we went from craving a familiar place in which to feel safe from the virus to decrying the staleness and familiarity of our shelters. As the confinement continued, the sanctuary rapidly deteriorated into a prison that we yearned to leave; its familiarity was no longer comforting but appalling in its tediousness and mundanity. The whole thing repeated itself, day in and day out. In this exhausting idleness, it became clear that a home is a place we wish to have in order to escape it: we need it to be there to return to, but only from time to time. In other words, the term “home,” far from being univocally tamed and familiarly simple, is actually a set of tensions, a field of complex affections, aporias and non-sequiturs.
A Scattered Shelter reflects the complexities which crowd the concept of “home”, gathering works that show how its conceptual sharp edges are impossible to smooth. The exhibition assembles the work of five artists who have spent the last three years honing their craft together at the University of Connecticut’s MFA program - meaning that they arrived to pursue their degrees when the pandemic was just shaking off the worst of its somber shadow. More importantly, it also means that they applied to the program at the height of the pandemic, perhaps trying to escape the confinement imposed at home. Nonetheless, as these works attest, forging a home far away from home is a tricky, precarious business, a task that often feels more like erecting temporary encampments on shaky ground or a castle on stilts. You move for three years - enough time to experience a phantasmagoria of permanence, and then just when you start to feel at home, you graduate and have to leave. This departure underlines the other crucial sense in which these years are steeped in precariousness: after all these years of honing their craft, will the art world recognize these artists as practitioners? After so much effort, can they finally claim their artistic medium as their rightful home?
The works gathered for A Scattered Shelter all exhibit such tentativeness in different ways, but they equally make us aware of how nebulous the act of calling somewhere home is. Rossie Stearns’ almost modular paintings, in which the canvas pushes itself out from the wall to create “contained spaces”, are a precise and poignant image of a life that requires compartmentalization to organize itself in the face of the fragility and uncertainty of the present. Something similar could be said of the suite of photographs presented here by Jennifer Davies: their delicate internal organization reveals the doubtfulness of any claim to sequential order in photography. The landscapes of Noah S.Thompson, printed on grainy paper and found wood, evoke the fuzziness of our recollections of things past, even when they are burned or etched in our memory. A different tone - more assertive, but also careful and critical - is present in the works of Logan R. Bishop and Kenny Heine. Despite their different mediums, the pieces of these two artists accrue a sense of fragility through their precise choreography of accumulation, projecting unique landscapes of rugged edges, ambiguous characters and blurred contours. All of these artists succeed in infusing their work with an air of strangeness that makes revisiting home feel like a unique, unfamiliar experience.
Not long ago, relational aesthetics - Rirkrit Tiravanija’s pad thai dinners in the mid 1990s; Dominique Gonzalez-Foester’s inviting lounges at the Pompidou or Liam Gillick’s bars; or even Dash Snow’s “hamster nest” hotel rooms circa 2008 - tried to show us not only how to not fear art, but how to actually feel comfortable in front (or inside) of a work of art. Art was a home away from home - or better, a “home in the expanded field” (Krauss, dixit). That was the promise, at least. Following Macuinas and Fluxus dictums, these artists created spaces - lounges, bars living rooms, even bedrooms to inhabit, for anyone to call home because was invited to it theirs, anyone could “come as you are,” as Nirvana sang. But alas, that was the 1990s speaking; the West had just won the Cold War, and the scaffoldings of a new global social contract were being erected through commerce and de-regularization. On top of that, the newly-minted “internet” felt like the final piece of the puzzle needed to democratize the globe. There were good reasons for optimism.
But then reality arrived - 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the financial crisis, the pandemic, George Floyd’s death and the new wars that plague our daily horizon these days– and those promises vanished into thin air. It makes sense, then, that artists react differently now, stressing the difficulties of forging one by appealing to its pervasive phantasmagoric presence. Thus, A Scattered Shelter in all its discontinuities and precariousness might be the ultimate testament of five young artists responding to uncertainty of the times, of showing unapologetically how fragile the whole thing feels.
José L. Falconi
Boston, MA
Included artists:
Logan R. Bishop
Jennifer Davies
Kenny Heyne
Rossie Stearns
Noah S. Thompson
On view: May 17 – June 29, 2024
Opening reception: Friday May 17, 6 - 9pm
