“Home,” threads together my art, my community projects, my employment. I am an artist, fair & affordable housing advocate, and documentarian. I combine visual art with ethnographic media, including audio interviews, house-hold objects, and photographs. My figurative paintings and installations dig into the concepts of home and housing from a community and personal perspective.
Painting answers the impulse to re-materialize my personal histories lost over time. My work considers the intimacies of home-space and the figures sharing that space. Dislocation often dissolves the physical record of belonging, and paintings allow me to reconstruct my memories of home and the fragments of home shared by the communities I advocate alongside. The paintings reach for domestic reference points both in content and material, hanging like drapes and featuring puddling mops & reflective mirrors. I integrate household objects with a sense of humor, reverence, and shame. The assemblage of fragmented memories and materials form an imperfect narrative of my home experience- at times close, specific , familiar, and just as often disrupted, abstracted, falling apart. Like For myself and those the people whom I work with as a housing advocate, these objects become symbolic of a place we can no longer visit.
The instinct to hold on to objects, photographs, and other forms of documentation is deeply embedded in my experience of housing insecurity. In making my work, I am recreating the muscle memory of relocation by holding onto the unwieldy materiality of things signifying home and carrying them bringing it from place to place. My role as a documentarian merges with my role as a painter. Painting acts as a record. The work holds together with a sense of precarity. Home is in what remains -in material and in memorey- rather than the shelter-structure.