Homebody

While home is commonly used in reference to a physical space, the concept of home extends far beyond the parameters of any structure. It is a place, but also a feeling. According to social scientist Aviezier Tucker, “most people spend their lives in search of a home, at the gap between the natural home…and the particular ideal home where they would be fully fulfilled.”

The exhibition Homebody is rooted in a desire to unpack the layers of “home” by placing in conversation artistic interpretations of the word and the complex feelings it evokes. Several of the artists investigate technologies used in the home, including the digital realm that opens up borders between self and other, the public and the private. Artists also abstract and reimagine traditional objects of comfort and utility, tapping into the complex relationship between the domestic space and capitalistic society. “Home” is also considered from national and ethnographic points of view through works that explore immigrant perspectives that straddle two homes, often a world apart. Other artists contemplate home from a more bodily perspective, how we find belonging in our own skin and the spaces we inhabit.

Homebody seeks to unravel the ambiguous term of “home” by delving into connotations of comfort, nostalgia, alienation, and perpetual longing evoked by a word wrapped in promises. All of the artists featured in the exhibition have ties to Detroit, granting Homebody both a local perspective and a spectrum of backgrounds and interests that reflect the complexity of the city itself.