Home Making, Rustad Galleria, Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George, BC

cast paper models of the "smallest house known to man" .5inch:1foot in the exhibition Home Making at Two Rivers Gallery — cast paper models of the “smallest house known to man” .5inch:1foot

For many years I have been investigating the theme of “home” as it applies to my life and the memories that I carry with me. I developed a cache of memories from living in a small cottage-like house, “The Smallest House Known to Man”, in Winnipeg in the 1970’s that continue to influence my art practice today. I reconstruct the idea of “house” and experiences of “home” using the memory of “The Smallest House Known to Man”. I examine the universal concepts of home and homemaking by enveloping the viewer with overlapping walls of “The Smallest House Known to Man” layered and floating in space. To lend them a fragile, amorphous quality, I used paper pulp to cast the house walls created from life-size and proportional stencils resembling the exterior walls of “the Smallest House Known to Man”. As memory dims, the house walls start to deconstruct, decreasing in size and disappearing into the atmosphere. Images performed by a pair of hands depicting domestic activities like sandwich-making, toilet cleaning, and dishwashing play over the walls in a continuous video loop. The video emphasizes the perpetuity of household tasks, their drudgery and uniformity but also imparts dignity to these ongoing endeavours.