But I Guess I’m Already There

A Group Exhibition curated by Roger Boulay exhibited at both the 410 Project in Mankato, MN and The Winona County Historical Society in Winona, MN.

Home is flimsy and firm. Home silly and clumsy. Home is a cage, but home is where we want to be.

 The timing of this exhibition will hopefully dovetail with people being able to leave their homes with more regularity, and therefore, some literal distance to consider ideas and metaphors about home. The audience will be able to intimately relate to the exhibition’s treatment of home as both a place of safety and a trap, even as these artists suggest additional ways of thinking about the rural, gendered, American home.

This exhibition explores notions of home as something contested and unstable, despite desires for it to be secure and constant. Through different materials and representational strategies, the six artists in this exhibition treat ideas of home with varying degrees of attachment and revulsion.

 Izel Vargas approaches home in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border. As someone with relatives on both sides of the border, for Vargas home in suspended in-between. The pink houses in Vargas’ work represent both the American ideal of the single-family home and the myth of that ideal, invaded by media and the realities of colonialism. Kathleen Hawkes portrays home through silhouettes of domestic objects, often using the negative as a central compositional strategy. Hawkes’ symbols for home are gorgeous yet smothering, noble and loved spaces, yet they threaten to fall apart. They speak to the problematic gender roles often traditionally assigned to home. James Wade’s polyurethane casts of homes similarly employ negative space. Homes are carved out of a nurf-like substance. In Wade’s work, home acts like a chest cavity, contrasting with the absurdity of the artificial material it is made out of. Rachel Cox reaches back to the origins of photography and one of its earliest, most endurable processes to depict homes that sway and buckle under their own weight. The grid format and title of the series (Wake Up) speaks to a desire to disrupt suburban culture. Alessandra Sulpy portrays home as a hard-won prize, a sanctuary, and a never-ending project. Sulpy’s work gives us a home as a physical and psychological space of both rest and anxiety. Jonathan Thunder’s film, Walk in Dreams, contains metaphors for home from the iconic Turtle Island that is both home and homeland to the Ojibwe people to the soundtrack that uses recordings of children’s toys and records that evoke home as a yearned-for place of comfort.