how good are your dwelling places (1 of 3)

Shelly's Appliance, in situ, found materials and video, 2009

I was brought up to believe a home was what you made of it.

Having been raised in the coal regions of the northeastern U.S., my exposure to varied religions and cultures was limited to attending Greek Orthodox Church services on certain occasions and eating Italian food in a Polish-owned restaurant. In 2005, my own family moved to a suburb of Rochester, NY that offered the most for our children’s education – a nationally ranked school district started by a largely Jewish community. It is now a somewhat diversified neighborhood although our immediate neighbors - all older Jewish - are pleasant reminders of its early development. Sylvia Weinthal sold us the house after building it and raising her family in it for forty-five years. Making the house our own meant taking it from its past. Within a day of possession we began to strip away its history - the record of a family and its routine intersections with objects and spaces. This has meant replacing elements of the home that were sanctified by the Weinthals’ constant presence and day-to-day tendencies with our own. I have never been entirely comfortable with that.

Sarah's Appliance, in situ, found materials, 2009

My art is both the transformed material evidence of my past and a surrogate for the missing. I draw on images, objects, and memories to form reliquaries of unconscious associations. All our experiences, performed imagined, past and future are inextricably linked to the objects and spaces that comprise our environment. For “how good are your dwelling places.” and exhibition organized through the Koffler Arts Centre and curated by Cyril Reade, I have focused my art production on my current domestic residence – what it had, what it has lost, what I want it to have, and how those relate to a collective understanding of domestic environments and cultural displacement, permanence, integration, and ignorance.

The works include fictional artifacts alongside real ones taken from my home, as well as hybrids of the fictional and the actual. All of the objects speak mostly to loss. The things in this installation pictured here attempt to recall an indistinct past that seeps into the malformed present. My inability to effectively call my past to the service of my present and my cultural ignorance surface through the camouflage of humor and dysfunction of seemingly functional objects and images.

The mezuzot temporarily affixed at the Koffler exhibition site came from the doorways inside the home where I currently reside. The Weinthals’ mezuzah remains on the frame of the front exterior door of my home.