Mixed Blessings challenges the meaning of “archive” by delving into personal domestic and religious objects intermingled with the structures of contemporary art. Acting as archivist, family caretaker and artist at the same time, Housewright uses objects from her family home -- presenting, organizing and skewing them in absurd, and perhaps unnatural, ways to suggest new meaning.
Mixed Blessings presents a series of works that combine family objects inherited from Housewright’s grandmother with her own contemporary objects and those from her immediate family -- books, bibles, clocks, a half pound bag of flour, trophies, toys, and paintings. Through her idiosyncratic probing into the objects of her family history and the particular influence of faith in the Protestant Christian subculture, Housewright mines notions of the sacred and divine that rests within objects and uses the archival impulse as a point of departure for making lost or displaced ideas physically present.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Elizabeth Housewright uses modes of archiving both pedestrian and professional to display objects with instilled histories both falsified and honest. Focusing on her personal narrative as it relates to Protestant Christian culture and faith she attempts to point to the divine and the holy instilled and living within in her family’s objects and the archives and spaces of sacred institutions.
On view July 29 - Sept 9, 2017; Opening Reception July 29, 6-8 p.m.
Price
- FREE!
COMMENTS