Home is Where the Heartlands
Kristina Jaugelis
(February 22 - March 24, 2007)

Artist Statement

This collection of photographic portraits and sculptures offers a playful and provocative look at some of the cultural tropes and conventions that guide our domestic lives.

Against a backdrop of middle class comfort, these works explore, with humour, a psychologically charged domestic landscape that resonates with 21st Century anxieties about security, identity, gender roles and power relationships.

The works in this series reflect the profound social changes that have occurred since 9/11. A concern for safety, a fear of otherness, and a return to traditional roles and values are all evidence of a cultural shift towards a frontier sensibility that champions survivalism, vigilantism, and individualism. What cultural myths inform this worldview? What femininities and masculinities are constructed along this frontier?

Home Is Where the Heartlands explores the potential freedom such identities offer their subjects, as well as the limitations of that freedom; our relationship to the places that we live in and call home; and the role of myth and fantasy in structuring our psychosocial lives.