Artist’s Statement
My work reflects on the differences between the concept and the reality of home.
I have never lived in the same place for more than two years. As a child, our family often relocated because of my father’s job, and we would spend our weekends touring open houses – trying to find the perfect place to live. The empty houses were always the most intriguing. I would imagine how the barren rooms would look with our family’s furniture, what we would change, and how we would decorate it. Even then, all I wanted was to have a home – someplace permanent and comforting that I could trust in.
My paintings draw from both my childhood experience of displacement, and the current housing crisis. In this series, I focus on painting the interiors of houses built in the first half of the 20th century in order to reflect upon the values and ideals contained within their worn-in floors and modest living spaces. I paint them using reference images contained in for-sale ads on craigslist and real estate websites. I am examining them against modern ‘cookie cutter’ houses, contemplating whether or not the progression of time and technology necessarily equate to social and moral progress.
I have recently chosen to remodel a pre-owned dollhouse as a reaction to the instability of my past and present living situation. In this body of work, the transformation of the dollhouse is the focal point of the work. The process stripped the house of its former identity as a child’s toy and gave it a much more quiet and serious role. In the photographs, the viewer is placed within the space of the house itself. The stark interiors contain only debris from their history. The absence of an obvious reference to scale leaves the viewer disoriented and confused. The process of remodeling and photographing this 1:12 scale doll house has led me to consider the inadequacies of the physical nature of home in creating a sense of security and belonging.
The subtlety of my presentation allows for contemplation rather than dictation. Neither body of work offers explicit resolution to the question of what constitutes as a home, and rightly so. We are left to ponder the true definition of home: questioning whether it exists in a philosophical sense, or if it is simply a construct.