325 ATLANTIC AVENUE
Sheltering Daydreams, 30-31 May 2007
Sonia Shiel, Vivienne Griffin, Francesco Simeti and Martin Healy
325 Atlantic Avenue, #2F, Brooklyn, NY 11231
Curated by Mary Cremin
This group show will explore the relationship between contemporary artistic practices and the notion of "home". It will reveal the contentious nature of the contemporary home as a place of protected intimacy while also signifying a site of alienation and displacement.
This altered notion of "home" is a symptom and expression of a new and historically original dilemma where double-lives are led, within our culture of migration and dwelling within the diaspora. Home becomes an imagined place or a fictitiously remembered or half remembered place that people want to exist, but it survives almost entirely in memory. It becomes a site for sheltering daydreams, for a lost time.
If Heidegger in Builiding, Dwelling, Thinking Poetically Man Dwells considered the world as the "house in which mortals dwell", Bachelard in The Poetics of Space will say the same of the image and memory of the house, which constitutes its own poetic place-world. He viewed the house as "one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind". He points to the daydream as an essential aspect of this integration. This exhibition intends to be a manifestation of the how the idea of home, can transcend all other memories and plays an integral part in our imagined history.
