HEIRLOOM

A heirloom is an old habit objectified, a haunted hand-me-down, part projection, part trace. It is not the gift itself but the strings attached to it. It can be, as in Tadashi Toyama's paintings of the imaginary mountain village of their grandparents – a place far from reality that the artist describes as 'the world in a free state of dreaming' – or, as in Thorben Gröbel's brutal room divider, the repurposed hood of a Porsche, a memory stripped of romance, laid bare by a vivisector's scalpel. In CABIN's second exhibition, eleven artists and designers reflect on the often ambivalent, ghostly, and, in every case, highly charged objects, images, and behaviors we inherit by way of family, place, or culture. An heirloom is not always given, sometimes it is triggered. Sometimes you don't know it is yours until you see it.