On people and passing, home and away

As I was planning the exhibition Far from Home I took great care to capture the themes of displacement, dislocation, relocation, and transformation from various perspectives. For instance, in some cases the person or subjects of the work are people that have relocated during their lifetimes; in others, the artists themselves have moved from one place to another, and this informs their work. In still other cases, my own reading of the work relates it to the topic, and is one of many possible interpretations, as is often possible with modern and contemporary art.

In my first blog entry, I ended by posing the question, what is ‘home”, and what makes it so? I write this later entry with this question in mind, because I recently became acutely aware of one facet that I had not considered while preparing the exhibition—at least, that I hadn’t consciously addressed. That is the role that a person or people, specifically family, can play in making a place ‘home’.

This facet came strikingly to the fore for me last month with the recent passing of my grandfather, age 92, in Toledo, Ohio. Toledo is very much one of our family’s homes, even for those of us who did not actually live there (most of the grandchildren). It was always home, in a sense, because Grandma and Grandpa were there and, in our minds, always had been. Following my grandfather’s death, I went to visit my grandmother for a week, though not in Toledo; she took some time away shortly after Grandpa died, and went to Florida’s Gulf Coast where my aunt and uncle have a second home. This, then, is where I went to visit her, and we spent many hours together, both speaking and in silence.

This physical displacement itself is not what called to mind the idea of displacement inherent the exhibition, however. Instead, it was the conversations I had with Gram there. During that time, Gram mentioned that she was grateful to have a place to get away following the harrowing loss, and couldn’t imagine going back without Grandpa there—in effect, it would no longer be home, so what was the point? After 67 years of marriage, the concept of 'home' had become inseparable from this person who was no longer there, sitting in his iconic (within our family, at least) olive green, mid-century modern leather chair and ottoman.

In retrospect, I wonder whether this was a gross oversight in my own planning of the exhibition, one borne of my unmarried status and itinerant life in which my family has always been far away from me. It sounds rather strange to me now, but only once in my adult life—a span of 3 years in Washington, DC, where I was surrounded by family as well as friends from several different stages of my life all within a few blocks or a few miles—has home ever been associated with people rather than with place or work.

For those five days in Florida last month, though, I did feel at home, because I was living with Gram, planning our days together, mostly what to have for breakfast and scavenging the beach for shells when her energy permitted and other such banalities. Otherwise we reclined in chairs by the waves excavating the past and speculating about our futures, and sharing daily activities together, as well as with my aunt, uncle, cousin-in-law, and her children—all this in a place that was wholly unfamiliar to me.

Even though this exhibition, its nuances and content are intimately familiar to me, in the last several weeks I find that I have started to revisit the Far from Home galleries more frequently given this profound shift in my own thinking, and I see things very differently. This transformation of my view of the exhibition makes me wonder what other people have seen in the show that I missed in the planning process, but may still lie beneath the surface. For example, I appreciate an aspect of Youssef Nabil’s work that he discussed during his lecture last night at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he related his self-portrait work to a longstanding preoccupation death, sleep, and peacefulness as closely allies, and the notion that being far from home one day will mean moving onto the hereafter, whatever that may be.

—Kinsey Katchka, curator of Far from Home