Date of Submission
Spring 2014
Academic Programs and Concentrations
Photography
Project Advisor 1
Tim Davis
Abstract/Artist's Statement
I am interested in how the language of taste, spoken in material objects, contributes to perception of identity. There exists a spectrum of taste that ranges from the barren to the flavorful. It relies on the supposedly intimate environment of the home, which turns out to be just an elaborate performance. Its components are found, borrowed, broken, and stolen, stitched together into a collage of personhood marked by color, texture, and surface. Personhood thrives on comfort and design.
The work illustrates and inhabits my emotional landscape while I am in these homes. I am responding to the alienation that grips me within domestic space; it feels plastic, cold, and temporary. The pictures give me respite among these attempts at individuality that is inevitably manufactured. In this way, the pictures are of and are about space and my failures of its expectations.
These homes spiral into a fractured and confused strangeness during the debate between public and private identity. Despite how bizarre some of these scenes may appear, try to remember that they are all cultivated out of social obligation to domestic space; an obligation that requires ongoing negotiation between the self and its audience. This kind of tension brings me back to the fragile precipice of “good” versus “bad” taste. It is at this moment that I am compelled to examine the masterpiece of necessity. Are we damned or are we bored? Welcome home.
Open Access Agreement
On-Campus only
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Harden, Evan M., "Home Sweet Home" (2014). Senior Projects Spring 2014. 69.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2014/69
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.
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