Home Works
with Tania Alvarez, Lauren Clay, Rachel Granofsky, Ann Toebbe and Rachael Zur
Chart
April 6 - May 6, 2023
CHART is pleased to present Home Works, a group exhibition featuring work by Tania Alvarez, Lauren Clay, Rachel Granofsky, Ann Toebbe, and Rachael Zur. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, April 6, from 6–8 pm, and the exhibition will remain on view through May 6, 2023.
How do you know a home when you see it? Do you just feel it? Simply contemplating the word, what appears in your mind’s eye? The answers are deeply personal, and likely have evolved over time. Homes are unique amalgamations of places and things, lived memories and moments that flood and define rooms. Day after day, year after year, we shape and reshape these spaces, adding our lives to their lineages, and they, in turn, become our worlds. As we build and imprint on them, homes in turn serve as the personalized settings for our own growth and development.
Home Works gathers artists who examine the architecture of our intimate surroundings and explore how those structures inform the personas we construct for ourselves. Whether it’s a glowing threshold, an illusory figure’s silhouette, or recreations of familial furnishings, the images in Home Works — crafted from a variety of materials and processes — speak to the physical remainders of lives lived in domestic spaces, as well as to the malleability of our homes and, by extension, the people who occupy them.
If our internal reference points are informed by personal history—by the places we’ve seen and been—then everything we can imagine is shaped by where we’ve spent our time. This exhibition considers these ever-shifting frameworks—because, after long enough, we become where we’ve lived.
Ann Toebbe toys with record keeping by way of recreation, piecing together fragments of remembered domestic spaces, often those family and friends. Her overhead vantages create flattened picture planes made from gouache and paper collage on wood panels that resemble dollhouses or embellished blueprints, each crafted from extensively planned preparatory drawings. Similarly, Rachel Granofsky recreates collapsed interiors, though hers are pictorially flattened via photographic lens. While they may immediately appear to be superficially embellished surfaces, closer inspection reveals the imperfections and seams of her sculptural process, as the manipulated spaces and furniture that have been reworked with paint and tape slowly appear.
Lauren Clay’s sculptural wall works allude to Neo-classical architecture, as columns and arches emerge from dream-like, illusionistic space. Sturdy stairwells emerge from carved curvatures and wisps of smoke, begging the viewer, like the constructions, to declare their footing before engaging with her airy landscapes. Rachael Zur also expands the depths of her paintings as she recasts quotidian items from the living spaces of cherished family members. Drawing on remembrances of rooms and their Proustian sensorial qualities, Zur turns to the power of tactility in conjuring memories of others from the objects that remain behind.
Each of Tania Alvarez’s works acts as something of an abstracted self-portrait, as the artist turns recollections and lived experiences into mixed-media interior spaces. Window-like forms evoke narratives of isolation, though their changing imagery intimates an ability to control how our own stories are told.