October 5 – November 1, 2017
Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery
Salve Regina University
The Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Sanctuary, a curated exhibition that explores definitions of home.
Sanctuary includes the work by seven New England-based artists who work in a wide variety of media. Together, the images and objects in the exhibition examine the sanctuaries we construct both real and imagined. Civilizations throughout history have built shelters to protect from the elements, invaders and predators, but at a certain point people craved more than mere refuge. Social and commercial issues such as privacy, family needs, and status began to influence the types of dwellings that were built and inhabited. As an ideology of “home” has taken shape over time, an elemental question prevails: “When does a house provide the sanctuary of a home, and at what point does it lose its homey status?”
Works in the exhibition include Emily Hass’s spare, poignant, architecture based drawings, Kelly Sherman’s Family House floor plans and Kathleen O’Hara’s wall paper/painting installation Peep Show. Fritz Hortsman’s small models taken from the form works of buildings he has known intimately occupy wall and floor space, along with Linda Nagaoka’s bone white ceramic sculpture of resilient plant forms that emerged from the ruins of the Hiroshima bombing.
Photography in the exhibition includes Remi Thorton’s spooky night-time photographs of abandoned buildings and Kelly Sherman’s Sofas series of the artist testing sofas in a Crate and Barrel store. Julia Hechtman’s video A Man Out of Time (For CM) documents a bearded, tattooed man’s experience of REM sleep. The inherent contradiction of this film with its cozy, serene bed and the slightly threatening bad-boy persona of the sleeping man ask the elemental question posed by the exhibition, “when is a home really a sanctuary?”
