'Home as an Irrevocable Condition' Exhibit at Sapar Contemporary
The work of four artists Poonam Jain (India), Heeseop Yoon (Korea/US), Wyn-Lyn Tan (Singapore), and Zsofia Schweger (Hungary/UK) that depicts their relationship to home. At Sapar Contemporary, 9 N. Moore St., through June 10. Information at aparcontemporary.com
Text below by curator Nina Levent
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. ― James Baldwin
Where is home? The answer might be three words or three volumes, as the question alludes to very immediate and concrete as well as transcendent and imaginary: Our childhood home, the home we never had, the physical dwelling where our physical self is at peace; an ancestral home that our forefathers left to never return back, the home of old memories, more distant with each passing year, until it is the place that is almost completely imagined. Or is it a destination, a place we hope to get to, for a split second or forever? Is home a creative hermitage or a figment of one’s imagination, at once vivid and illusive? For this exhibit four female artists are challenged with defining the notion of home, and finding the visual and conceptual language to represent it.
Poonam Jain’s installation for this show was inspired by a happenstance: she picked up a discarded notebook on the street in Mumbai. The notebook most likely fell off a truck that picks up old paper in that neighborhood. It is a notebook that can be found in many simple households in Mumbai, where women offer tutoring for local kids. The book, also displayed in the exhibition, is filled with dictation words written repeatedly by a young student. The words suggested by tutors are related to the most urgent topic for adults in early 2017 in India - money and demonetization. Jain explores this dictation notebook for ideas about learning at home through repetition, reasoning behind choice of words by female tutors, and mistakes introduced by tutors and repeated by their students many times over. “Apart from the emotional attachment to one’s home, I am interested in the question is how socially each home grooms its children. In this series of works I explore the notion of learning and imposition.” In her installation Jain recreates child’s scribbles as delicate watercolor drawings where every letter is carefully painted over many hours to look as if it is made out of chain links. She also disrupted the obedient repetition of words by creating a puzzle out of these words. Jain’s work is a meditation of what and how we learn at home, on whether a home is a safe abode or a comfortable cage, on our need to question authority, explore choices, and assert freedom inside a home.
For Zsofia Schweger this exhibit is an homage to her childhood home in Hungary and an attempt to find a renewed sense of belonging in London where she now resides. In her pastel-toned paintings of the rooms in her childhood home, she contemplates the impossibility of returning to a place and time, and she explores her own nostalgia, old memories, notions of comfort and alienation. The renderings of the interior spaces are bare and abstracted, the colors, especially in the recent works are so light, that the forms of objects are almost disappearing and morphing into signs. "My recent work is linked to the idea that home is rooted in both space and time. If that holds true, then - with the passing of time - return to an old home is impossible. For me, nostalgia has proved to be productive. I've found that recognizing the impossibility of return or the fact that I feel no longer at home in an old home, has been helpful in determining where home is for me in the present."
Heeseop Yoon is well-known for her immersive monumental still lives that depict haphazardly piled up household objects, pots, pans, bins, wire coils, electrical appliances - things that once served an important function in a home, objects that trigger memories, objects that are connected to personal histories. Yoon’s obsession with creating these enormous still lives thatenvelop the viewerwith piles of discarded or collected objects stems from time spent in her parents' basement where she still finds childhood objects and her dad’s tools and old appliances.: “The idea of it started from my effort to collect the objects with my personal history, depict and present them so that I could be surrounded by them wherever I go. I may not have my home everywhere but I can make anywhere feel home. Until I left Korea in 2002, I never realized the notion of home because I was living in it. When I visit Korea now there are less and less things that make me feel home, except my parents and their basement full of things that my family accumulated, things I recognize easily. Perhaps I may never be able to find another home once I won't be able to physically see my parents and the objects in their basement.”
Wyn-Lyn Tan is exploring subtle connections between East and West through the representation of natural landscape in both cultures. An urbanite who grew up in a cosmopolitan Singapore she questions her own affinity and innate understanding of natural landscape. She also explores the lure of Nordic landscape and Northern Europe where she spent most of her time in recent years. “Over the years, I have spent time in various parts of Northern Europe, and it was here that I felt a strong link between the Orient and the West. I experienced a similar sense of breathing space, or Qi in the Northern European landscape as I would in a Chinese ink painting. I believe this has shaped and informed my visual language.”