The global pandemic and quarantine collectively isolate us with orders to shelter in place, to stay home. We retreated, we escaped, we returned, and many of us discovered ourselves suddenly displaced from our lives. Certainly uncertain, quarantine living involves a degree of slipperiness, in which the parameters of place feel hazy. It is often unclear whether we are here or there, now or then.
Still we open the windows on our home screens, connect to the checkered architecture of friends, loved ones, strangers, framed by the grid. The 3pixel bordered walls render us connected as much as they keep us apart.
Go home
A reckoning of longing and belonging. When the pandemic hit, the resulting cracks led to outpours of something that had been brewing much deeper, for much longer. Barbed rhetoric inspired taunts to “go back to where you came from.”
But to where do we return? Where does one ever really belong? If here and now feels uncertain, then how do we re-envision the shape of home?
回 (hui, return)
Perhaps, instead, we can reframe home through 回 — a verb as proxy for place.
A character that frames a space to which we return, to go back, to will.
A space that holds a center within a center; a hole inside a whole; enclosed in two-dimensions that opens again in three.
Together, we’ve built a space that both collapses distance and defies containment. Here, artists map the contexts of existence by examining identity, place(less)ness, diaspora, an eternal return towards a home always on a horizon.
Together, we’ve built a space that both collapses distance and defies containment. Here, artists map the contexts of existence by examining identity, place(less)ness, diaspora, an eternal return towards a home always on a horizon.
Hosted solely online via a networked virtual gallery, the exhibition explores new ways to reimagine our relationship with communities and place in an increasingly virtual world.
RETURN
The global pandemic and quarantine collectively isolate us with orders to shelter in place, to stay home. We retreated, we escaped, we returned, and many of us discovered ourselves suddenly displaced from our lives. Certainly uncertain, quarantine living involves a degree of slipperiness, in which the parameters of place feel hazy. It is often unclear whether we are here or there, now or then. Still we open the windows on our home screens, connect to the checkered architecture of friends, loved ones, strangers, framed by the grid. The 3pixel bordered walls render us connected as much as they keep us apart.
