Stone House Art Gallery is pleased to present If We Get A House, a collaborative exhibition featuring new works by Gabriella Carboni and Lauren Anaïs Hussey. Inspired by the curiosity into how one chooses to inhabit domestic spaces, the artists have created an investigative group of works combining elements of drawing, painting, and sculpture. Ideas of fantasy, of aspiration, of how we surround ourselves, and of what provides comfort and safety build snapshots of fleeting moments that become tangible through this collaborative series. If We Get A House prompts viewers to reflect upon our built surroundings, while drawing upon the pertinent dilemma of what constitutes the idea of home for rising generations.
A home is where intimacy and privacy both exist. This is the place where Carboni and Hussey’s work collides. Independently, each artist portrays such ideas through constructed narratives, showing glimmers of domestic personality, and revealing subtle truths of what the home’s visitors should perceive. Carboni’s work depicts intimacy, kinship, familial ties, touch, and comfort. Her work is often non-objective, using memory to retrace familiar lights and shadows to depict time-stamped scenes within the home. Similarly, Carboni’s sculptures utilize hard amorphous form and volume to portray physical intimacy, while implying the human figure intertwined within utilitarian structures. Hussey creates a similar environment, eschewing the figure directly, and instead placing the presence of human form within voids wherein the figure might have existed. Much akin to her previous works, Hussey maintains an interest in privacy and the power that information holds through decisive sharing and concealment. She defines these concepts through a well balanced use of materials in her paintings, offering familiarized views out of windows and a combination of textures, colors, and shapes that provide comfort, pleasure, and mystery.
Through collaborative efforts, the artists toggle elements of identity, space, and play. Function and collectorship become nestled within their investigation of the home through the manifestation of recognizable objects. Such objects sit atop a pair of bumpy shelves presenting as vases of mixed sizes, colors, and forms in quirky nonuniformity. Unable to hold any water, flowers placed delicately within each vessel have quickly shriveled and dropped their petals. A bench nearby, designed in collaboration by Carboni and Hussey, speaks a similar tone. The U-shaped design offers the ability of guests to sit with privacy away from one another, or to bump knees accordingly sitting face to face. The bench, however, is ironically unable to be sat upon at all due to its material incapabilities. Like the vases, the bench performs for the viewer an idea of likeness and functionality. A comedy of sorts, the collaborative objects reflect Millennial ideations of playing house as the never fully-realized adult in a stumbling culture of economic pitfalls and disadvantages.
If We Get A House gathers touches and glimpses into the imagined home. It offers an abstract look into personal history and kinship through tension created by physical and non-tangible space. The whimsy captured in each artist’s work portrays joy in the comfort of one’s domesticity, while moments of mystery fraught with introspection beget future uncertainty and trauma from lives lived.
If We Get A House will be on display at SHAG from August 18th through September 16th, 2022.
