After the Guests


 

 “To be at home is to know where you are…”

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

 

After the Guest, 2020

Embossed paper, bristol paper, acid free glue, acrylic paint, graphite, and charcoal on found watercolor paper. 57 x 27 inches

The dissolution of experience appears as the blank impression of a house. Embossed paper shows its spectral absence, while tendril-like marks meander in a random pathway into the world, further diluting the once vibrant home. The lack of, or instability of a home space can be detrimental to identity. Where does one store memories, organize thoughts, or feel safe if there is no home to rest within?

Individual identity dissolves into an apparition, with no anchoring structure to haunt. Interactions are shallow, repetitive, and all times blend into one another. A home, with its solid foundation and organization of memory, becomes a transient location, disappear into individual moments unstuck in time and experience, flashes that never write themselves into permanent memory, or that layer upon one another so that they cannot be differentiated.

The homogenous experience of the guest/ghost floats through an outside world of easily digestible, shallow experience, a daily chronicle of moving through life which never solidifies into the stable and stately home of cultural imagination. The metaphorical mansion where thoughts and actions are organized into specific areas and the become the esoteric rituals of upkeep and existence, fades into the enforced repetitive business of existence away from home.

 

Memory consumes, reaching to pull us toward its repetitive horror, only to disintegrate. The inevitable crumbling of the structure of home, in order to reveal or obscure, becomes universal and personal. It shows the bones, the instability, and the decay of the reflected mind in each fallen slat and structure.