HONEY, I'M HOME!
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Honey, I’m Home! revisits the idealized domestic life of the 1950s and 60s, drawing inspiration from iconic sitcoms 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. In this place, 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.
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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 such as accent walls, warm lighting, and shag carpeting establish an atmosphere that is both familiar and unsettling. Corrupted family photos and Jack Terry canvas prints, displayed above eye level, evoke fragmented recollections and prompt viewers to gaze upward, echoing a child’s point of view. These evolving environments and disruptive imagery reflect the struggle between preserving and releasing the past, capturing how grief distorts and reshapes cherished memories.
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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 juxtaposition of wood and fiber highlights traditional gendered divisions of labor within the family. Carpentry, linked to woodwork, is commonly viewed as a masculine craft, historically passed down from fathers to sons. In contrast, fiber arts such as embroidery, which involve softer materials, are associated with femininity and are typically handed down from mothers to daughters. The exhibition challenges this binary, as I, the oldest granddaughter, inherited both skill sets. Working in both mediums—hard, rigid 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.
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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.
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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 childhood innocence alongside the abruptness of loss.
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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, the permanent and the ephemeral.
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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.
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Moving beyond the confines of the home, an aquarium filled with water submerges ceramic urns, honoring the vast number of lives lost during the COVID-19 pandemic including my grandparents. The urns gradually disintegrate in water—symbolizing the slow erosion of memory over time. Historically regarded as a feminine material for its nurturing, pliable qualities, clay evolves into a gender-neutral medium, embodying masculine and feminine energies. This work mirrors the cyclical nature of memory and loss, emphasizing the potential for transformation and renewal even in what has been worn away. It builds on the material conversation between rigid wood and pliable fiber, extending it to clay’s transformative process, where destruction opens the door to new possibilities. While memories may fade, they carry the potential to be reimagined and reconstructed, echoing the enduring yet ever-changing essence of grief and the lasting effects of shared loss.
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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.
