September 17, 2017 – January 14, 2018
Wednesday – Sunday, 1:00 - 4:00 pm
Guest Curator: Elizabeth Michelman
Reception – September 17, 1:30-3:30pm
Curator’s Talk/Coffee: Thursday, September 28, 10:30 – 12 pm
Artist’s Panel: Sunday, November 19, 2:00 – 3:00 pm
Fran Bull, Stations 10 (detail), 2016, plaster, paint, muslin and mixed mediums
Participating in the exhibition: Fran Bull, Louise Farrell, MaryEllen Latas, Nora Valdez, Roya Amigh, Heather Park Hanlon, Emilie Lemakis, Kirstin Lamb and Susan Alport.
Artist, critic, and independent curator Elizabeth Michelman presents Close To Home, an exhibition of installations by nine women artists at the Art Complex Museum at Duxbury opening September 17 and running through January 14. http://www.artcomplex.org/exhibitions.html
Speaking through multi-generational and multicultural perspectives, nine women artists passing through or living in New England critique experiences of intimacy and vulnerability associated with fantasies, memories, and social constructs of “home.” Widely ranging in their use of materials, artistic ideologies, and metaphors, the artists explore the fluid boundaries of self, home, and family. A female presence and sensibility makes itself known through installations of objects, sculptures, videos, photographs, drawings, and paintings.
In one corner Heather Park Hanlon’s photographs and altered furniture document the destruction and rebirth of a family’s home, formerly a church, from the scars of fire. Maryellen Latas’s rippling expanse of ball-pen ink covers a wall with obsessive jottings on her father’s maritime career and her own life consumed with caring for others. Archetypical figures under shrouds enact the bedroom intimacies of love, birth, and dreams in Fran Bull’s Stations. Photographs, videos, and vitrines of charred relics bear testament to the flaming trajectory of Emilie Doppelganger, the stuffed alter ego of museum-guard/artist Emilie Lemakis.
Encapsulated in limestone, Nora Valdez’s migrant women drag their homes and belongings like Sisyphus from one perch to the next. Lighter only in its material, Roya Amigh’s paper-and-thread constructions interweave anti-immigrant slogans with fragments of Persian fairy tales. Kirstin Lamb’s ever-multiplying details of portraits, flower arrangements, and folk patterns lay bare the ambivalence of middle-class homemakers captive to conventions of décor and fashion. Susan Alport’s wall-archive of personal letters, photographs, drawings, and ephemera narrates her life-choices and formative memories ---with no regrets. Louise Farrell reconstitutes the estrangements of her long-lost Louisiana family in a tableau of heirlooms and soft-sculpted figures.
Meditations, polemics, and memories fuse here in a dialogue about the home as a central life-giving force in women’s experience. The shapes of our lives may be tempered through migration, marriage, and caregiving or threatened by sexual violation, anonymity and conformity. A world of relatedness and loneliness, home is a mythical site of creation, sustenance, and destruction. It may offer an occasion of re-envisioning and rebuilding, or of moving far beyond our known selves. It can all take place, be imagined, or return to haunt us--- close to home.
— Elizabeth Michelman, Curator -- September 2017
