The Waiting Room
@Gallery 71
Edina, MN
Exhibition dates:
Aug 9 – Oct 27
Reception:
Aug 9, 7-9pm
Artist Discussion:
Oct 17, 6-7pm
Featuring the art of Lamia Abukhadra, Katayoun Amjadi, Sarah Sampedro, Chris Willcox; curated by Katayoun Amjadi.
Home Inside Out explores the idea of “home” not just as the sheltering eave and centering hearth, but as the site of alienating dynamics of loss and the slippage of identity, of barriers to ownership, of separation and longing. The artists in this exhibition reflect on the idea of sheltering space, from personal, collective, national or cultural perspectives. Home becomes a discursive arena in which inside and outside spaces hold specific social and cultural associations that can be subtended or subverted through artistic representation.
Inside and outside are conflated in Sarah Sampedro’s installation where the vulnerability within social and economic power structures becomes part of the everyday. Here the occupant is held “outside” by the language of exclusion and hidden borders. As an exile, Lamia Abukhadra looks into historical and colonial narratives and portrays the trauma of inheritance and national loss. After all, in Adorno’s words, ‘it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” The outside spaces in Chris Willcox’s paintings evoke a temporal and metaphoric threshold: the contemplative place between home and play or work. Here time suspends, light fades, quiet settles in. Promise waits at the door. Katayoun Amjadi’s works take on a metaphorical approach to the ideology of home as commodity, the consumable good. Clay and porcelain speak to production and prefabrication yet the work suggests a fragile vulnerability. Time and gravity whisper in conspiratorial tones.