Date of Submission

Spring 2012

Academic Program

Photography

Project Advisor 1

Barbara Ess

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Domestic space, the home, is a rich and complex state. It represents both tangible, simple fact, and ultimate fiction. One’s inhabitation stands for safety, protection, and solidness, both physical and mental. It is a sturdy place that remains, stoically waiting for the return of its inhabitants. But what one uses this space for, and what slight traces one leaves behind upon the body of the home are infinite, full and imaginary. A house is filled with dreams and memories, the remnants of passed events, and all these perhaps projected upon the space by the dweller or the experiencer. Then again, perhaps these indistinct fragments are not so sketchily perceived. It is in the domestic space that such formless entities are allowed to take shape and inhabit a physical form in the volume of a room or structure. Almost like a projection from an old movie reel, one can see them, experience them from a temporal distance and sometimes almost grasp them, but that’s the nature of what can never fully, independently exist outside of the mind. The boundary of Almost But Not Quite.

Thought, memory, imagination, dreams all exist on this border. One leads to another, just as a hallway leads to a different room, or a window separates interior from exterior, while leading the viewer from one space to another. The house as the entity encompassing these other spaces represents a line between public and private while cleverly comingling the two.

One exists in a state of transition when one is in a domestic space. Past, present, and future, childhood and adulthood are allowed to inhabit the same plain. Interior touches exterior. Though you know where you are, you can easily imagine your way out of that very same place, and into some daydream stitched together from disparate scraps – textured dreams, patterns of habit, memory, all colored by imaginings.

Being at home is about relinquishing control, relaxing into some in between place. It is about giving in to intuition and acknowledging the most deep-seated notions or feelings an individual can experience. It is a mirror or a movie screen, passively interacting with those occupants who come and go. It is universal.

Everyone has a residence. The notion of home is, however, as diverse as the number of dwellers existing in these homes. Houses are filled with objects, or not, but these images are vignettes – essences of domestic space and its particular philosophies or notions, not recreations of specific places embedded in a singular conscious. They are the memory, the imagination or the dream of a home. They stand for a collective unconscious feeling everyone senses. They trace and interpret the meditations, conceptions, inferences, and visions that ripen in the warmth of a temporally confused space.

These deceptive rooms are the product of dimensions. What is flat becomes commodious. What has volume becomes planar. These circuitous transformations are a physical representation of thought and so exist on the same sort of dreamy frontier as the notion of home. All the while, the most brute building block remains unchanged allowing the dichotomy of consistent and disjointed, nebulous and tangible to exist. It is the meeting and coexistence of seemingly disparate ideas, the harmony of opposites.

To watch and be watched. Looking and being looked at. Though figures hardly play a role in this collection of poetic snippets, vision and its act are incredibly potent forces twining their way through the intimate photographic narrative. The house is an impenetrable, intangible, universal archive that can only be deconstructed through the sensory, intuitive act of seeing.

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