Making Home – at home and abroad

For my Capstone Project, I created a dual exhibition centering on the theme of home, in collaboration with Elody Gyekis, a Schreyer’s Honor student at Penn State University, double majoring in Painting and Ceramics. The show was entitled “Making Home: at home and abroad” and was exhibited both in State College, Pennsylvania, and in Syracuse, New York, in March 2009. The body of work was the culmination of our three-year collaboration and consisted of photographs, drawings, paintings, sculptures, ceramic, and video art. The making and installation of the pieces investigated the physical and emotional experience of making home, as both young women and as contemporary artists. Encompassing our travels between different worlds both at home and abroad, the exhibit explored relationships with people and places that formed the foundation of our sense of home, and informed our identities. Some of the pieces were created in direct collaboration, by working together with specific assignments in mind, while others were made independently and later critiqued both in person and over the Internet. Although the individual pieces that comprised the show drew upon past experiences, the installation of the works into a cohesive exhibition focused upon the present. Rather than presenting a documentation of the search or loss of home, the show centered on the actual creating, or making of our home. The physical locations that inspired the works ranged from Italy to China, but focused specifically upon the places that Elody and I actually lived, such as central Pennsylvania and Moscow. Through this collaborative conception and creation of home, we hoped to prompt the audience to explore their own personal identities and understandings of the concept of home