Close to Home

Close To Home protests our complacency toward familiar ideals that almost never resemble our realities. Artist-Curator Elizabeth Michelman brings together installations by nine women artists in a conversation on intimacy, vulnerability, and the emotional dynamics of homelife. The artists beguile us with conjured lives, re-configured memories, and compulsive longings for beauty and order. In their artistic processes they freely interchange materials and strategies of contemporary painting, photography, performance, sculpture, video, and language. The works of Close To Home meet in unexpected parallels and collisions of drama, dissociation and irony. No single idiom of conceptualism, minimalism, expression or surrealism prevails.

A work of art, like concepts of home and self, offers a transitory balance in a world of instability. Through a lifetime of struggle, the artist may no more than momentarily achieve and convey a sense of wholeness about something that may once have been, that is forever lost, or that may yet come to be. The conversations among these works can’t help but draw us in. They touch us close to home.

Elizabeth Michelman draws context for the exhibition from the museum’s collection of classic domestic furnishings crafted by the Shaker community.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.