Interior / Exterior

“Space is a pressing matter, and it matters which bodies press against it.”
– Elspeth Probyn. “Lesbians in Space. Gender, Sex and the Structure of Missing”,Gender, Place & Culture, 2:1, 1995. 77-84

Interiors are the settings of our private hopes and dreams; the intimate places we hang hats, eat with family, converse, sleep. Exteriors are where those dreams are made and enjoyed. In daylight or under soft streetlights, in fringe and sequins and denim and leather, communities form in public places. To be in public is to perform. We dress and decorate our bodies to conform to the ideals of the space we’re in. From boardroom to barroom to bedroom, we adjust to the spaces we inhabit.

Exteriors are also those places where dreams can be broken; where the politics of place favor one body over another. People of color, those with disabilities, queer folk and we who identify as women all traverse public space knowing it is in many ways exclusionary and even dangerous. As Michael Keith and Steve Pyle mention in their introduction to Place and the Politics of Identity, “space is not an innocent backdrop to position, it is itself filled with politics and ideology.” (1993, p.4) As we construct spaces from cement, wood, bricks or steel, space in turn plays a role in our construction of history, of memory, of being.

Julie Alpert, Macon Reed and Kathy Sirico reconstruct familiar objects and places through spatial memory. The production of private spaces using sympathetic materials and textures amplifies their function as havens of comfort and safety. Kathy Sirico’s Lost Horizon suggests a threshold between reality and an imagined utopia with its impressive size and collaged array of soft materials. Macon Reed reassembles tropes of the lesbian bar in Eulogy for the Dyke Bar (2015-2019), paying tribute and testimony to the loss of shared queer female spaces by creating her own. Julie Alpert recalls the decor of early childhood and the anticipation of landmark events, creating an exaggerated mock party scene from craft paper, cardboard and ribbon. These spaces interrogate the memory of place through theatrical decoration.

Benjamin Armas and Ori Carino’s work embodies the incendiary effect of gentrification on changing neighborhoods and their inhabitants. Their meticulously constructed dioramic sculptures suggest New York City brownstones in the aftermath of conflagration. The acrylic paintings that accompany the sculpture are evidentiary--painted in part with ash from the destruction of the sculpture.

Kaori Yamashita’s hollow walls salute the mortar, that which binds, over that which separates. Her works embody the passage of time and the slippery space of memory as attached to the fundamental construction of “home.” The proximity of construction materials and architectural details next to decorative objects suggests a scene of artifacts found in an archaeological ruin. Unpinned from any specific time and place, we can see the connections between these typically hidden construction materials and their domestic counterparts.

Our memories of places populate them and make them whole. A celebration, a loss, banalities, extravagances: all form the substance of our cities, our homes. The proximity of space can form communities or break them–the old moves on and the new moves in. Here, we celebrate and mourn those contingencies of circumstance and place that alter courses.

Curator, Ariel Zaccheo