HOME AND HETEROTOPIA
2006-7
The expectations we place upon external environments provoke us to question our place within space. Memory, personal choice as well as forces out of our control affect our claim to the past and future. The concept of hindsight can be used to secure or redefine actions in the present that affect our relationship to surroundings. Time, distance and social constructs challenge our control over place and identity. The shifting area between exterior and interior thus offers not an explanation, but an exchange of power between what is expected, projected and displaced.
A paradoxical feeling exists between the landscape of Alberta and the house; the threatening solitude of vast spaces and the familiarity of home. It is a strange sensation when one does not feel at home in the house they grew up in. It is even more peculiar when the landscape becomes the home, and the house instead becomes a china cabinet full of memories and objects reflecting another world. These places do not leave me when I leave Alberta, they are the spaces that call me home. My experience of ‘home’ acts as a foundation for this work that is based on an interior and exterior dialectic and a social/environmental commentary. This body of work deals with these issues in a playful manner where scale and colour depicts the differences and similarities between the urban house and the rural beyond.