HONEY, I'M HOME!
Honey, I’m Home! revisits the idealized domestic life of the 1950s and 60s, drawing on iconic sitcoms like “The Honeymooners” and “I Love Lucy.” The exhibition explores how gender roles within the traditional nuclear family have evolved. Through the lens of nostalgia, it delves into the emotional landscape of the childhood home, a place where the comforting scents of family life intermingle with memories of laughter and warmth. However, this familiar setting is transformed into a deeper reflection on grief, memory, and identity.
The personal loss of my paternal grandparents during the COVID-19 pandemic is a significant theme in the exhibition, highlighting a period that profoundly altered my understanding of “home.” Deprived of traditional mourning rituals and the physical space of my grandparents' home, I was left to reimagine these intimate spaces. The gallery merges the sterile, white-cube environment with the warmth and familiarity of a childhood home. Environmental elements like accent walls, warm lighting, and shag carpeting create a space that feels both familiar and unsettling. Corrupted family photos and Jack Terry canvas prints, hung above eye level, evoke fragmented memories and encourage viewers to look up, mimicking the perspective of a child. These shifting spaces and destructive visuals symbolize the tension between holding on and letting go of the past, capturing how grief distorts and reshapes cherished memories.
A central theme of the exhibition is the evolving role of gender and how this is mirrored in the materials and mediums used in the artworks. The stark contrast between wood and fiber speaks to traditional notions of masculine and feminine labor within the family. Carpentry, associated with wood, is often considered a masculine craft, traditionally passed from father to son. Conversely, fiber arts like embroidery, which use soft materials, are associated with the feminine and are often passed from mother to daughter. This binary is challenged in the exhibition, as I, the oldest granddaughter, inherited both skill sets. By working in both mediums—hard, structured wood and soft, pliable fabric—I blur the lines between these gendered conventions, creating a dialogue between masculine and feminine expressions of labor, care, and memory.
A coffin-shaped coffee table, crafted from red oak—a wood traditionally used for coffins—sits at the center of the exhibition. The solidity of oak conveys the masculine craft of carpentry, often associated with durability and strength. This piece embodies the death of my grandfather and the loss of our shared physical space, encapsulating the duality of creation and destruction. It also addresses the overlooked funerary practices during the pandemic, including automatic cremations and mass graves, where families were denied the opportunity to say goodbye.
Nearby, an unfinished quilt draped over a rocking chair embodies the softer, more intimate work of care traditionally associated with women. Its incomplete (glitched) pattern signifies memories and connections I can no longer fully recall, serving as a tribute to the disrupted bond with my grandmother. Positioned across from a CRT TV playing a distorted Disney movie from a sanded VHS tape, this installation places the innocence of childhood alongside the abruptness of loss.
A further exploration of memory and personal history comes through my grandfather's wardrobe, transformed into a recontextualized photo album. His Hawaiian shirts and “Old Guys Rule” t-shirts, hand-stitched with cyanotype prints that capture moments from his life, express how clothing embodies personal memory and public identity. The tension between preserving these garments and letting them go underscores how objects can carry emotional weight amidst grief. The soft, wearable fibers of the shirts—deeply personal and connected to daily life—juxtapose the rigid wooden structures elsewhere in the exhibition, highlighting the interplay between the masculine and feminine, as well as the permanent and the ephemeral.
In another installation, a section of textured drywall with insulation spilling out evokes the destruction of childhood memories. The playful but hazardous materials—multicolored mini teddy bears mingling with pink fiberglass—convey both the fragility and urgency of preserving memories, contrasting the traditionally masculine construction materials with the delicate softness of childhood symbols.
Moving beyond the confines of the home, an aquarium filled with water submerges ceramic urns, referencing the burial of my grandparents at sea. The urns slowly disintegrate through the process of slaking, where dry clay dissolves in water, representing the gradual erosion of memory over time. Historically viewed as a feminine material due to its nurturing and pliable qualities, clay has evolved into a gender-neutral medium, embodying both masculine and feminine energies. Its transformative potential—through reformation and rebirth—mirrors the cycle of memory and loss. The ability of clay to be reused after slaking unveils the possibility of reshaping and renewing even what has been eroded. This work extends the material dialogue between hard, structured wood and soft, pliable fiber to the process of clay transformation, where destruction leads to new potential. While memories may fade, they can also be reformed and reshaped, echoing the transformative nature of grief.
Through the interplay of these materials—wood, fiber, and clay—the exhibition reveals how traditional gendered labor engages with larger themes of loss, memory, and identity. Honey, I’m Home! invites viewers to reflect on their own experiences with loss and memory, offering a space for collective contemplation on how the concept of home evolves through grief. By examining mourning rituals and family histories, the exhibition brings a deeply human experience to the forefront, resonating on both personal and universal levels.
