"Homing: An installation and Art Exhibit"
Featuring work by Todd Laby with Audrey Heller and Pamela Merory Dernham
StoreFrontLab, 337 Shotwell Street, San Francisco. www.storefrontlab.org
February 7th-February 23rd, 2013
Opening Reception, February 7th 7PM-9PM, Closing reception, February 23rd, 7PM-9PM. Exhibit hours: Wed 11:30-1:30 and Thurs.-Sat. 3-7.
Visual artists Todd Laby, Audrey Heller and Pamela Merory Dernham come together to wade through the messiness of how we set our bearings when our notions of origin and destination are in reality mere approximations. Through sculpture and installation the artists explore unsettled notions of returning to origin, memory as approximation, positioning and finding one’s bearings.
Laby’s installation “Migrating Houses” asks what happens when the ideal of home is uprooted. He has sculpted a herd of wooden houses, lifted skyward on spindly legs, teetering on a steel ground that no longer offers a way for them to plant their foundations. These delicate, vulnerable forms evoke fascination and empathy, as they seem pulled between collapse and lift off. Over several weeks, the houses will journey through the StoreFrontLab. Are they seeking a permanent location? Are they leaving behind an environment that no longer sustains them? Laby's "Migrating Houses" provokes the viewer to consider our ideal of home, whether it be dwelling, town or country. Do we inhabit the world of this uprooted herd?
Pamela Merory Dernham's passion as an artist is for the depiction of human interaction: the intertwining of feeling, thought, and experience, expressed by gesture and attitude, that tie us together. She finds the root of this in our need to rely on each other in order to survive. One of the conflicts of this need is over who is at home where. How implacable is this concept or how accepting of variability is it? How influential is our fundamental relationship to each other as human beings? What influences the answers to these questions? The history of humankind is full of various resolutions. This issue is personal for Dernham because half of her mother's family became considered alien in their home and was slaughtered. How were the survivors to find a home? Was it possible to find a home? Dernham's steel wire figures are a metaphor for her rebuilding of her family, her relations, and the connections that she lost. As Dernham's figures bear witness to the migration of the houses possible answers to these many questions resonate between them.
Laby and Audrey Heller’s collaboration “Moving Boxes” invites the viewer to peer into an array of boxes, representing the objects and emotions that we pack and bring with us from place to place. Each interior holds a tiny scene, a diorama of memorabilia, images of home, daily life and things of the past, or representations of feelings and dreams. The scenes evoke memory, and nostalgia, as well as joy and a sense of connection. The viewer may find their own memory stimulated by universal images, or question the nature and reliability of memory itself, and the way that our sense of self is tied to our objects.
For more information Please contact: Todd Laby at toddlaby@me.com
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