In-Dwelling
Rosemary Starace
at The Oxbow Gallery
(then in Northampton, MA;
now located in Easthampton, MA)
October 31–December 1, 2019
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See photos of individual pieces from the show here
In-Dwelling Installation, panoramic view of entire gallery. Photo by Peter Schlessinger
View of back right corner of gallery, featuring the large painting on back wall, “Moon Dwelling.”
Video of my talk at the gallery on art and process
In-Dwelling Statement
I love the basic shape of a peaked-roof house—shedding rain, sheltering lives.
This image has called to me again and again. Though most of the work in this show is new, some goes back decades. The house always has something more to say, its richness never exhausted. What our dwellings offer us is generous and enduring. They protect us from elemental danger, shield us from scrutiny, provide a setting for the drama and intimacy that make our houses home.
Rooted in the earth while pointing to the sky, facing the outside yet enfolding an inside, houses are agents of connection, lively intermediaries between the internal and external, between ourselves and the gods.
I have always thought of houses as beings. From there, it is not much of a leap to identify with them, to see them as bodies—to see my own body and self as a house that lives in a house.
We abide within layers of shelters like nesting dolls. We rest within a larger, overarching structure, or it rests within us. We house mysterious forces that shape us from the inside even as we are shaped by external circumstances.
The ultimate “house” to which we entrust our lives is the earth itself, with its roof of clouds and stars. A sorrow slipped into some of these works, a sorrow that hungers for the emergent immanence of creation, and faces the calamitous upheaval of all that once seemed dependable and abiding.
I started these sculptural houses in response to the plight of refugees and they became an homage to our universal quest for sanctuary and safety. Houses, bodies, civilization—our whole human endeavor is so rickety. Like these houses, we are beauties made from refuse and paint and cardboard, always on the way to dust. We make meaning out of the torn papers of memory and our worn out, “holey” innocence.
View of left side of gallery, showing the large painting, “Territory,” and several small house sculptures.