What is “home”? How does it feel? What does it sound like? What does it look like? Is it a place, a person, an object that makes home *home*? And how steadfast does home cling to us? In a transient city like Boston, young professionals and students are constantly moving. No place or community is permanent, yet the idea of home is one that is familiar and real—one that we can call to our memory readily.

 

As we grow up, we often leave our first home, the one of our childhood. Our physical bodies leave that physical space, but the emotional connection to home is tethered to a deeper part of ourselves. Not just a geographic coordinate but a domain both physical and emotional, home is simultaneously always—and never—changing. Imbued in furniture, beds, utensils, doors, and carpets are routines and rhythms around which our most vulnerable selves learn to dwell. To feel the grain of wood on a bed frame, or catch the faint smell of a carpet, is to unearth forgotten childhood memories.

 

What has home become?

What Akiyama and Snyder have prepared in the gallery is not a home, but a dream of home. Laid out in the space are not pieces of any particular home, but abstracted home-objects, coated and blurred with the ways one might have remembered and forgotten his or her childhood. Painted recountings of history are overlaid by semi-opaque representations of heritage and significance. What peculiarities has someone tuned out, or remembered clearly? 

The walls and furniture are lined with a fuzzy veneer, alluding to a blurriness like the one created by squinting one’s eyes. In the space where specific memories of home are lost, nostalgia constructs and imagines the home that one might wish to have had. Music will play throughout this dreamy *home*, both an underscore and main attraction to the experience. The aural, tactile, and visual planes are all equal component of this work. In this exhibition, the artists invite audience to not only feel the presence but also the hiddenness of *home*.

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-program note by Youngjin Song, with help from the artists