Melissa Vandenberg melissavandenberg.com
Home As Situation, Bolivar Art Gallery, University of Kentucky - 2020 “Home is part object, part duty, and part performance. As populations shelter amid COVID-19, we confront the notion of home as a place of both refuge and isolation. Our homes can carry a great deal of privilege or pain–depending on wealth, job security, family, and the immediate community. Through hardship, artists continue to work at home, we continue to create, and ponder how our work, and the world, might change while we weather a pandemic. Stuffed Kirkja and Glerkirkjur are forms where phallic steeples meet the space of home. The shapes are absurd and sexual, an odd architecture for troubled souls. I have revisited the basic iconographic house structure in my studio practice for over 2 decades, but a long trip to Iceland in 2017, inspired another look. Since then, I have made several trips back and forth to Scandinavia, looking for familial connections to my Nordic roots. The simplicity of this familiar house/church is striking, its roofline ideal to shed the elements. It signifies an overlap of male and female attributes to our domestic lives, a place where power is gained and relinquished, and faith offered and discarded