Home, place and house are areas in which we strive to identify ourselves. We hope to understand our origins, family and history. Interiors are designed, decorated and constructed to reflect our public and private life. They narrate our intentions, the way in which we are seen—or wish to be seen. The sense of home evokes an idea of where domestic affections are centered.
The artists in Home Tour investigate the domestic environment through a lens that is simultaneously sugary sweet and sharply sour. Exposing the nature of place, these works are not without extreme beauty and whimsy, but they also offer a sensation of longing and nostalgia, and the desire for the feeling of belonging.
Featuring artists schooled or working in Georgia, many incorporate materials associated with home improvement, domestic labors referencing women’s work, and the desire of perfecting interior settings.
HOME TOUR ARTISTS
Sarah Hobbs: Hobbs’ photographs reveal beautifully obsessive interior arrangements insisting on sanitized abundance. “Constructing psychological space is the driving force behind my work. I examine concepts that involve the human psyche: neuroses and compulsions that challenge us all, questioning the idea of normal.”
April Childers: Childers’ work strives to develop complex relationships by examining objects and imagery in popular culture. “Identifying popular culture from a distance, I take on the role of a weary, outside observer as opposed to an active engager.”
Justin Barker: Barker’s cool modernism harkens back to simple and tender times, his Nebraska house being an accurate model of a childhood home.
Sam Stabler: Stabler appropriates Old Master works, lush oil paintings of interior tableaus, and updates them to the contemporary setting through color and minute detail.
Paige Adair: Adair’s gouache paintings offer a window into fantasy rooms, begging playmates to get wrapped up in the hidden fictional tale.
Kaleena Stasiak: Stasiak exaggerates the elegance of the Southern mansion with over-scaled mantels, columns and ceiling ornaments creating a whimsical retelling of Southern architecture.
Carol John: John’s love of Pop and the ordinary object in the home results in a series of bright color geometry with images of a pitched roof or gable.
Jessica Machacek: Machacek’s objects circle around a wry critique of suburban desire marketed for middle class America, using big box stores for inspiration.
InKyoung Choi Chun: Choi Chun, with painting and object, color and formal structure, uses the frame of architecture to investigate the delight and comfort of the daily routine—setting a table, having a meal, or strolling outdoors.
Melissa Harshman: Harshman, a consummate printmaker, furthers her investigation into the domestic with the addition of sewn works in floral arrangements, reminiscing on the armchair doily.
Jessica Wohl: Wohl mines the tradition of quilting in ways that evoke comfort, warmth, protection and loss. “The fabrics in these quilts have been found or purchased from thrift stores and yard sales across the country. They are hand-me-downs, throwaways, stained, smelly, loved, discarded and Someone Else’s. Like the makeup of our country, they are Others that become one, and their unification can call to attention the magnitude of what is possible when varied and different parts come together harmoniously. “
Meg Aubrey: Aubrey’s painting miniaturizes an iconic suburban setting through the view of a door of a dollhouse.
