Unimaginable Possibilities of Discomfort

Far from Home has provided me with a valuable opportunity to reflect on the effect relocation has on the potential of the relationship between ones sense of belonging and sense of place. And the effects dislocation and relocation have on our relationship with that place we call "home", both past and present. Many of the works in the show, for example Ruud van Empel's World #18, Seydou Keïta's Untitled (#277), Lalla Essaydi's Silence of Thought #2, and Lorna Simpson's Vantage Point reveal a rich, restless melancholy that demands a revitalization of view point.

Shortly before making Mt. Manhanttan, I made a series of small oil paintings that also featured as their subject mountains titled after major international cities. These paintings, however, had the expressionistic quality of snapshots taken with an instant camera out of the window of a moving car. Like vacation photos, the bright, colorful paintings spoke to a sense of beleaguered Romanticism, a recollection of ideal forms that cannot be captured, which might never have existed in the first place, but which continue to occur and reoccur, continually useful in their tireless optimism.

Moving from a small village in, England, via Edinburgh, to New York City has, over time, released a need to reassess and redefine my identity, and the place I inhabit. I am thankful for this often uncomfortable and dislocated self, as I believe that unimagined possibilities in the everyday can only be realized though the disruption of current systems of knowledge. I have come to understand that reinventing ones sense of self and place has enormous transformative potential.

—Jane Benson, Artist, featured in Far from Home
www.janebenson.net