Un-Home-Like, 2010
The cabinet is a collector of mementos. In my installation, the
cabinet is also a survival raft. By mixing metaphors of the home, the
flood, and the subconscious, I am exploring how suppressed memories of
traumatic experiences can adversely affect behaviors, actions, and
relationships within the home.
In referencing Delacroix’s “Barque of Dante and Virgil”, I am exploring
the difficulty one faces in making the arduous journey of recovery
from trauma. I am also raising questions regarding a person’s ability
to remain integrated in their individuality when the residue of
suppressed fears and anxieties floods the psyche.
The element of fantasy in the scene gives concrete expression to
subjective experiences of the psyche. Here past and present, dream
and reality, conscious and unconscious, familiar and unfamiliar, exist
together, and create an uncanny (un-home-like) environment. This is
meant to evoke the manner in which past traumatic events are very much
part of the present through memory and, though hidden from those
around us, are made concrete in the world again through the conduct of
the person experiencing them.