What constitutes home and how do we know where we belong? For some, home may be a building, a bed, a person, or a feeling. For others who have had homes destroyed, had difficult home lives, or have felt like they do not belong to any one place, home becomes harder to define.
This exhibition explores how artists have rendered the idea of home in their work. Some represent home as existing across cultures, others as a longing for their motherland, while others see home through the lens of trauma. While some artists use their work to celebrate home and pay homage to their families, others recreate home as a way to rewrite difficult memories of war and loss.
Home is a universal concept, and many people derive their identity from their place of origin. This exhibition explores how among immigrants, those who have relocated throughout their lives, who straddle multiple cultures, or who lack a well-defined home, depersonalization—or the feeling that one has no identity—is common.1 In an attempt to restore a sense identity, many of these individuals engage in a lifelong attempt at symbolic restitution of their motherland. Artists, for example, channel this loss of identity into their work in an attempt to recreate home.2 No Place like Home seeks to explore how artists have represented different conceptions of home through diverse media, how these ideas have been altered through trauma, immigration, and repatriation, and how they are literally made visible.
- Henry Krystal, Giorgio de Chirico: Ego States and Artistic Production (Johns Hopkins University, 1966), 217.
- Ibid.