A Home (Various Others 2023)
A Home has been mostly on the road in the past three years. I found myself sitting in trains, sitting in cars. Traveling between two places and living in two worlds. I lost touch and some feelings. I gathered new insights and fall into new emotions. A Home is a semi-fictional model.
When I moved to another country, I gave up on one thing in exchange for another. Starting from scratch. New beginnings without old endings. No hard feelings. I felt drawn to places that gave me comfort. Mountains, lakes. Silent sites. Buildings with dimmed lights and burning candles. Windows with opaque glasses and filled up with a foggy atmosphere.
A Home is a memory, a blurred memory. On display in the gallery, there's a metal structure that occupies the centre of the space. It’s an installation made of modular components. Each component has the same external dimensions. They are all crafted individually with industrial materials and relating to different parts of architecture. The structure needed to be large enough for a person, so it’s 210 cm high and 86 cm wide – which are standard measures of doors. The work has been constructed with two half open doors, and it contains some smaller objects.
Behind the installation there’s a white wall in front of a hidden window. A blind spot. I put a blurred, blue window on the wall. It has lost most of its transparency and opens to the moment when the night falls. It gains a new function. It refers to things we can’t see that hide underneath the surface.
To the right of the installation a small cabinet stands next to a framed watercolour painting. It depicts a cloudy day over Monte Verità in Ascona from two summers ago. The wooden object is DIY and functions as a carrier for abandoned clay objects. It has openings and a metal door to enclose them. Books, flacons, a drawing. They all inhabit the furniture now and make it their home.
Some homes are a blessing. Some homes are a burden. Pick your poison, you might say. A Home describes the process of telling a story with the means of sculpture and industrial materials. A sequence of wrong turns, false starts, and personal experiences, as an endless attempt of processing. A Home is that too.
Patrick Ostrowsky, September 2023 (re-edited November 2024)
