“Where’s home for you?” That question is hard to answer: I think about it a lot. I’ve spent many years in and near Seattle, but as a non-citizen, while it may feel like home, I’m certainly not from here. Am I from Ontario, where I was born? Not if I haven’t lived there all these intervening years — that doesn’t track. What makes a home, or the idea of it?
A show I saw recently, at the North Seattle Art Gallery, addresses that question. A small show, with just a few artists, it still held my attention with each powerful artist statement I read. Here’s the show’s main statement:
When we think about home each of us conjures a different image, and these continue to morph and change throughout our lives. For some, home is the container — the place — that holds our daily activities; for others it is where our emotions and memories dwell; for still others it is about hose we care most about; and for some it is all of these. The concept of home also brings to mind a balance of scarcity and abundance, the transitional nature of place, as well as what it means to build a home. After the last few years in which most of us spent more time “at home” than we ever imagined we would, ideas of home have expanded.
Show statement, Ideas of Home, North Seattle Art Gallery, Winter 2023
Each artist had their own statement beside their work. Kathy Liao, for example, noted how her “… recent paintings … document the fluid state between experience, memory, and place. Like well-worn film negatives, I revisit images, snapshots, and memories through iterations, until they begin to morph, overlap, and degrade.” For a set of screen prints by Daphne Minkoff, she notes “Memory of place has been a constant idea that I’ve explored for decades… I’m curious about the intersection of the reality of a place versus a childhood memory, for example. … an idea of home becomes distorted and in some ways, is more profound and impactful than the reality of the actual place.”
Like Minkoff, I’ve been thinking about this since I arrived in the Seattle area, in 1989, and I’ve used my art to process the concept, much as she has. When I think about the one house that means home to me, where I started elementary school, it’s one that echoes the shapes Minkoff often paints. But when I look it up on a street-view map, it’s just not mine anymore. So, I take home with me, I re-establish it when I move, when I downsize, and when I visit family. And I continue to process, and question, as these artists are doing too.
Details
The show is up through March 3rd, on the North Seattle Community College campus, in the art gallery next to the bookstore. Hours are 11-5 Monday to Thursday, 11-2 Friday while the show is up.
The exhibition includes works from: Martha Armstrong, Tyanna Buie, Olivia Fredricks, Shruti Ghatak, Ariston Jacks, Kathy Liao, Daphne Minkoff, and Markeith Woods.