CAN'T CALL HOME•2019
Can’t Call Home attempts to walk you through a shotgun style house where you are invited in with “Vulnerable Embrace” inspired by the loss of my grandmother and the strength her stern personality displayed polarized by the warmth of her love for her grandchildren. This piece would represent the living-room. "Unshakable beliefs” would move us through to a bedroom as it speaks to comfort or lack thereof as with navigating issues of mental illness within my family. The matters springs etched on the glass denotes the evanescent feeling of familiar comforts fade. The use of glass jars as the counterbalancing mechanisms syllables the fragile state of mind in distinguishing between reality and perceived reality. Whereas the balancing content of those jars reflects the misinformed way in which mental illnesses are referred to. Impeccable restfulness we often get from the consultation of a parent gradually becomes our role as depicted by the mop and blanket hybrid. Next, we are sitting in the kitchen where I spent years of my childhood listening to my grandmother sharing family stories. She spoke often of my grandfather who passed away when I was one year old. As I grew older she would begin to point out similarities in our personalities while also pointing out character flaws he had such as physical abuse brought on by excessive drinking. These conversations would give me the strength to resist character altering vices such as drugs and alcohol in my teenage years. It was her cooking and her children's love that brought the family together for holidays and special occasions year after year yet she would tell you it was her prayers and God’s will. From there we move into another bedroom with a focus on the bed as a place of comfort. A bed of Roses is about the comforts that define home for most people. The pillows etched on the glass hints to a double bed shared by a couple coming together to establish a new sense of home. I believe that parents make a house a home and for those raising kids as head of the house of their own home, the feeling of home my still lie in the house they grew up in, especially if their parents are still leaving there. I would say it's the protective comfort we feel that define home for many. We then move to the yard or the fall of life with "Fallen Leaves” where the memories of lost loved ones linger like leaves of fall. We begin to rake them in as an attempt to hold on to the only parts of lost love one's life we have any control of.
Mother's Day named for the day the highest level of calls are made. Constructed of architectural materials and domestic objects in the shape of a phone receiver reflects on how we communicate. From sitting around a table or standing in a slightly ajar screen door getting the neighborhood updates and “When I was young” sits as a reflection on memories of the upper ninth ward neighborhood I grew up in and what it has become since then.
