Theme Exploration -Global Views of Home

By Co-Curator Eleanor Heartney, on display in Jones-Carter Gallery at 108 Henry Street, Lake City, SC

Few words in the English language have the resonance of home. To have a home is to possess a place in the world. The word suggests shelter, security and belonging.To be homeless in the narrow sense is to lack a place to live and sleep, or as current official terminology has it, to be unhoused. But in a larger sense homelessness also suggests an existential condition, a sense of isolation or disconnection that has nothing to do with having a roof over one’s head. Today, as people are increasingly untethered from the place where they were born, home becomes something that must be invented or reconstructed. Home becomes a state of mind as much as a physical location. Global Views of Home explores multiple aspects of the idea of home. Some of the artists are Southern by birth, while others, having left their homes to resettle in theAmerican South, are Southern by choice or necessity. The work offers a reminder that home can represent both sanctuary and confinement, freedom and restraint, a place to run to and a place to run from.What makes a home?

One might begin to find an answer by contrasting the work of Lori Larusso and Maggie Evans. Larusso’s colorful, pop-inspired works are full of the stuff that we associate with domesticity. Furniture, utensils, pets, and especially food become characters in her work. People are deliberately missing, but we feel their presence through the things they surround themselves with and the things they consume. A Pastiche of Good Intentions is a monument to abundance and extravagance, complete with such oddities as a broccoli poodle, a butter cow and a three tiered cake topped with a squirrel. The whole creates a bit of a queasy feeling-too much of a good thing. If we are what we eat, what does that mean about who we are? Maggie Evans, by contrast, presents a world marked by absence. Instead of the identity-defining commodities of Larusso’s vision of home, here we have austerity and emptiness. Evans describes her work as an expression of the struggle between the search for individuality and the need to belong. In her interiors the human presence is suggested by unoccupied generic chairs which are positioned below or infront of windows that open onto a blank and inaccessible outside world. Home in her work is an empty stage which denotes isolation and loneliness-a fortress against the outside world which threatens to become a prison. Together Larusso and Evans suggest that having too much or too little unsettles the idea of home.

Meanwhile, the luxury of having any home at all haunts the work of Maggie Kerrigan and Sherrill Roland. For Roland, home is a literal prison. His work revolves around his ten month incarceration for charges from which he was ultimately exonerated. Fig Leaf on Cell #19 and Fig Leaf on Cell #45 are inspired by the ways that prison inmates maintain their sense of self while living in an environment of total surveillance and control. The plexiglass panes suggest the doors of the cell. The piece of toilet paper affixed to an opening in the door evokes the trick used by inmates to block outside eyes while attending to bodily functions. The paper is covered with a text in which Roland records thoughts he wanted to convey to his daughter’s mother during his time in prison.

Kerrigan chronicles a home that is lost in another way. She uses books as an artistic medium-shredding them, carving into their pages, weaving fragments together, turning them into sculptures. She always maintains a link between the subject of the book and the final art object.Her installation takes its name from the book from which it has been created. Their Tender Hearts is a work of fiction inspired by theU.S. government program in effect from the 1880s through the 1990s that involved forcibly removing Native American children from their homes and placing them in boarding schools. Kerrigan has transformed the pages of this book into a memorial to these broken homes. The pages have been connected to form looping ribbons and perforated with holes that represent the void left behind by the children’s disappearance.

This exhibition also contains happier stories of artists who have been displaced from their homes only to make a new life in a new place. Sisavanh Phouthavong Houghton describes herself as a 1.5 generation Post-Vietnam War Lao American refugee immigrant. At the age of four she and her family fled their native Laos during the chaos that engulfed the country during what is now generally known as the SecretWar on Laos. In a less known aspect of the Vietnam War, Laos was heavily bombed by the U.S. military as part of a plan to drive the communist insurgency from the country. Houghton’s family landed in San Francisco and she grew up in the midwest.Now she lives and works in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The title of This Land was Made for You and Me is an expression of every refugee’s dream of inclusion in their new home. These delicate abstract paintings with their swirl of bright colors and shapes evoke the mixed feelings that are part of the immigrant experience - a mingling of nostalgia, longing and hope. Their modular format reflects the nomadic aspect of the refugee life in which one must always be ready to pick up one’s possessions and relocate.Iranian born Raheleh Filsoofi is also focused on the immigrant experience. Having grown up in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, she came to the United States in 2002. Her arrival was complicated by anti-muslim sentiments stirred by the events of 911. Now based in Nashville, Tennessee, she uses her art to heal the artificial divisions that separate us. Imaginary Boundaries is an ongoing work that has evolved over time to adapt to her own experiences in the United States. The installation consists of a set of tv monitors whose screens echo architectural details from the celebrated music room in the 16th century Ali Qapu Palace in Isfahan, Iran. Peering into the openings, which evoke jars, vessels, and Persian string music instruments, viewers find themselves face to face with various individuals who peer back at them on video monitors. In its original iteration, first presented in 2017, the work appeared in two parallel shows in Florida and Tehran where viewers of each country encountered people from the other. In the version presented here, Filsoofi takes on the divisions within her adopted country, filling the monitors with faces ofAmericans who address themselves to other Americans.

Russian born photographer Anastasia Samoylova brings an outsider’s perspective to life in her current home on the Florida coast. Her perceptive eye captures the paradisiacal beauty, but also the environmental precarity and developmental frenzy that threaten the future of the South Florida coast. The works are from a series titled FloodZone, in which she presents the effects of hurricanes, floods and risingwater levels on urban centers that have been built at sea level. She documents the devastation wreaked on flimsy buildings by high winds and driving rain, but also acknowledges the lyrical beauty of sunsets, tropical flora and fauna and the long horizon lines where the sky kisses the sea.There is also humor here-as when a pairof feral chickens stroll down an urban sidewalk, unintimidated by the high rises that loom in the distance.Immigrants often have a heightened awareness of the oddities of their new environment.

But moving to a new country can also sharpen a sense of what was left behind. Alexi Torres was born and raised in a small rural village seventy miles southeast of Havana, Cuba. He has often employed agrarian metaphors in his paintings, at times painting images that appear to be constructed out of leaves, grass, or feathers. Here he recalls another aspect of his former life in Cuba. Moscow references the powerful shadow of Russia and the manipulation of the media that was part of Cuba’s Soviet derived system of control. This painting presents St. Basil’s Cathedral on Moscow’s Red Square as if constructed out of satellite dishes and other electronic communication devices. This iconic building becomes a Cathedral to the impulse to surveil and dominate all aspects of life and serves as a more general warning about the seductions of authoritarianism.

Artists like Houghton, Filsoofi, Samoylova and Torres are reminders that America is a nation of immigrants. But the transition from the old country to a new one can be fraught and is complicated by the realities of politics and economics. That is the subject of Noah Scalin’s Huddled Masses series. These works, based on photographs documenting conditions at the Customs and Border Protection facilities in Texas, are“painted” with commercial stickers that celebrate American consumer products. These underscore a clash between America’s culture of consumption and its lofty ideals. The series title, taken from the Emma Lazarus poem engraved on the base theStatue of Liberty, serves as a reminder that America’s traditional promise of welcome and inclusion is too often at odds with the treatment of refugees and migrants at the border.Seen through the eyes of these artists, home is a complicated concept. It can be a blessing, a dream and, at times, a nightmare. Whether given or made, home shapes who we are and what we believe we can do.