HOUSE WORKS

Dark House kite - G. Peters

HOUSE WORKS 

at the Western Colorado Center for the Arts

Grand Junction Art Center

December 6th 2013 - January 27th, 2014

This exhibition is a collection of photos, sculptures and installations of Melanie Walker and George Peters exploring the varied themes of the house and the idea of home.

Exhibition Statement:

The house is a nest, a place of retreat, a collection of life memories, a shelter from storms, sometimes a prison made to escape from, a place to return to. It is our societal glue, placing ourselves into a community of other houses in suburbs, cities and village communities. Our house mortgages hold us there. Our families grow up there.

                                                                                                    

Our roots to place are also our house foundations. It was not so long ago that our inherent nomadic wanderings took us to places that we could plant and harvest. We stayed and built houses of stone, sticks, mud and straw from the earth we tilled. Our houses shaped us. They formed our protective exoskeleton cocoon and grew with us through  our evolution to city dwellers. Even our technology connections return us to our “home” page.

Part of what brought us together as an artist team was our similar artistic sensibilities. We both have done works in installation, sculpture and photography using the theme of the house. The house is a strong image of our place in the world. We have even been influenced by our sleep dreams of houses as totems and as mazes of endless rooms and corridors. The house has slipped into our psyche and made a place of its own for us to wander in and explore. We’re using this exhibition to extend our understanding of the place our houses have in our lives.

Melanie Walker's works include her photography featuring her 'Househead' series. 

"The Househeads came to me in a dream. They came at a time when I was searching for a sense of place. As a single woman I was trying to determine what home was without family. They became my fictional family. Home is an idea that we carry in our heads.

The Househeads first appeared in my work as constructed images done through a Polaroid Materials Grant. They evolved into installations, puppets and other permutations. At one point,  I found a box of negatives at a yard sale. I made prints and re-photographed all of them with houses on the heads. Friends saw them and began bringing me their family pictures to include so they could be a part of my fictional family. This has been an ongoing project that I return to over the last 20 years"

The Puppet - M. Walker

The Sleeper - M. Walker

The Architects - M. Walker

Baggage - M. Walker

Marriage - M. Walker

OMPHALOS is an installation series of view houses by Melanie Walker with windows to peek into the interiors. Each scene is revealed through motion sensor lighting and sound effects transporting the viewers into miniature rooms.

 Curtain Lights - M. Walker

Test Tube Babies - M. Walker

Ancestor House  - M. Walker



Hatching House - M. Walker

Radio Room - M. Walker

LAND ESCAPES are a series of works using the house in relation to the land that is it's foundation. They appear as islands of influence set adrift in time and place.

Pine Beetle - M. Walker

Desert Shack - G. Peters

Green House - G. Peters

Shack - G. Peters

Winter Tree House - G. Peters

HOUSE FLY KITES - The following kite forms are made using a dye sublimation photographic printing process on polyester and framed for flying in very light winds. 

Brick House Kite - G. Peters

Cuckoo Clock kite - M. Walker

Stone House  kite - M. Walker

House Hand Moth  kite - G. Peters

Cloud Tower kite - M. Walker

House Fly kites & Painted houses

The painted houses are acrylic on wood of our homeward imaginations. They are follys and pattern plays for making a shelf size city scape. We have been making these works for the last two years for ourselves and our friends. This is  our first exhibition of these small houses. 

Painted Houses

Bird House - G. Peters

House of the Moon - G. Peter

The screen house installation is a memory of the Colorado Front Range flood which damaged many homes and lives during October of 2013. The screen material used causes moire' patterns that shimmer as the viewer passes by.

High Water - installation by G. Peters & M. Walker

Mobile Homes & Plato's Aviary - installation sculptures

The combined installations of Mobile Homes and Plato's Aviary set on the stage area of the gallery is a collage of birds, windows, picket fences, house forms, tornadoes and walking houses. Plato wrote  of a recollection of a discourse in which Socrates states an analogy on the nature of knowledge. It compared the process of thought to the act of grabbing at flocks of birds in a cage. A person at the center reaches out to the wild movement inside the cage and doesn't know or can't control what he may catch.  The grasping is like hunting for true knowledge. One might catch a dove or a crow or nothing in the flurry of flight.

Plato's Aviary - M. Walker & G. Peters

HOUSE WORKS  - opening night



More images from the HOUSE WORKS  exhibition  can be seen on our Flikr site as well as images from our slide lecture