Over the course of two years, I lived in four houses. Mold, raising rents, threatening neighbors, and other factors outside of my control conspired again and again to remove and uproot me, rob me of my meager savings, and place me in peril of homelessness. This tale of transience has marked my view of the concept of home and made me aware of my role as a disposable tool of gentrification and displacement.
By virtue of being a white, working class, creative, I have unwittingly participated in the destruction of beloved places I called my home. The presence of people like me changed the perception of neighborhoods to trendy or desirable. I helped to set the stage for waves of wealthy newcomers and investors to follow me, driving rents higher and replacing affordable housing with luxury high rises. Once my role in the cycle was complete, I too was driven out and discarded.
My work aims to express appreciation for the amount of time and energy it takes to create a feeling of home, and how much of that energy gets lost and left behind. I build disordered structures from salvaged and reclaimed wood and paint upon them “portraits” of the houses I have lived in. My constructions are formed from old floorboards, window sashes and railings that I recover from burn piles and dumpsters, restoring purpose back into the weathered lives. The structures I build are, at the same time, fixed and impermanent. Screws and fasteners are all removable, and their grip on the boards is often tenuous at best. The overlapping mismatch of boards is equal parts deliberately planned and desperately hasty.
The paintings present images of street views, devoid of figures, parked cars and other evidence of human presence. They present the home as an object rather than a place. It is a source of income to be bought or rented rather than a somewhere to live. Blank windows and missing walls hint at their shallow emptiness. Their artifice is revealed as the flat image stretches around the uneven topography of the surface. Mournful earth tone colors imbue each scene with a quiet nostalgia of loss.
By virtue of being a white, working class, creative, I have unwittingly participated in the destruction of beloved places I called my home. The presence of people like me changed the perception of neighborhoods to trendy or desirable. I helped to set the stage for waves of wealthy newcomers and investors to follow me, driving rents higher and replacing affordable housing with luxury high rises. Once my role in the cycle was complete, I too was driven out and discarded.
My work aims to express appreciation for the amount of time and energy it takes to create a feeling of home, and how much of that energy gets lost and left behind. I build disordered structures from salvaged and reclaimed wood and paint upon them “portraits” of the houses I have lived in. My constructions are formed from old floorboards, window sashes and railings that I recover from burn piles and dumpsters, restoring purpose back into the weathered lives. The structures I build are, at the same time, fixed and impermanent. Screws and fasteners are all removable, and their grip on the boards is often tenuous at best. The overlapping mismatch of boards is equal parts deliberately planned and desperately hasty.
The paintings present images of street views, devoid of figures, parked cars and other evidence of human presence. They present the home as an object rather than a place. It is a source of income to be bought or rented rather than a somewhere to live. Blank windows and missing walls hint at their shallow emptiness. Their artifice is revealed as the flat image stretches around the uneven topography of the surface. Mournful earth tone colors imbue each scene with a quiet nostalgia of loss.