These works were included in THE HOUSE PROTECTS THE DREAMER, a two-person show with Krystal DiFronzo at Kingfish Gallery in Buffalo, NY in June 2022.
From the press release:
"The House Protects the Dreamer explores the intuitive resonances between inherited domestic skillsets, labor, and the home as its own body of inherited trauma. It investigates labor as a time-intensive, meditative and restorative practice that concurrently uses and consumes the body. The home is both a site of labor and a site of shelter; processes of decoration and covering-up are at once restorative and claustrophobic. Methods of making and the value assigned to craft are understood as generational inheritance, where process-based, tacit knowledge is passed down alongside trauma. The body and its practices cannot be severed from its ancestors and the physical spaces they share. This knowledge connects mind, body, and input from the world while presenting the opportunity to either reify the traditions and traumas or actively reroute them.
Krystal DiFronzo turns to the 1970s film Wanda for new considerations of the home. The title character grapples with a sense of aimlessness after leaving her husband and hopping from various domestic spaces of men trying to find a space of comfort and security, all against a Rust Belt backdrop. DiFronzo examines the discomforting notion of home–a tension between commeradie and difference–through their examination of materiality, labor, and storytelling. If Wanda examines the day-to-day and real-life struggles of her main character, then DiFronzo’s labored weavings access a symbolic, transcendent temporality. Their weavings allude to the dream world or the archetypal realm, impossibly inexhaustible of meaning and nuance while examining larger notions surrounding death and birth. Kathryn Shriver uses mass-produced fixtures and handmade facsimiles of hardware associated with commercial home decor to examine the intersections of domesticity, taste, class, and both the intimate moments and little upsets embedded in home life. Along with using the geometry and repetition of beadwork, her practice investigates how a home can absorb a presence through what remains–hardware holes, hooks that once held clothes, indexical mark making of a former resident. Both artists play with the home’s psychological resonances, comforting and discomforting, to examine personal narratives while deepening a tacit knowledge of material."
From the press release:
"The House Protects the Dreamer explores the intuitive resonances between inherited domestic skillsets, labor, and the home as its own body of inherited trauma. It investigates labor as a time-intensive, meditative and restorative practice that concurrently uses and consumes the body. The home is both a site of labor and a site of shelter; processes of decoration and covering-up are at once restorative and claustrophobic. Methods of making and the value assigned to craft are understood as generational inheritance, where process-based, tacit knowledge is passed down alongside trauma. The body and its practices cannot be severed from its ancestors and the physical spaces they share. This knowledge connects mind, body, and input from the world while presenting the opportunity to either reify the traditions and traumas or actively reroute them.
Krystal DiFronzo turns to the 1970s film Wanda for new considerations of the home. The title character grapples with a sense of aimlessness after leaving her husband and hopping from various domestic spaces of men trying to find a space of comfort and security, all against a Rust Belt backdrop. DiFronzo examines the discomforting notion of home–a tension between commeradie and difference–through their examination of materiality, labor, and storytelling. If Wanda examines the day-to-day and real-life struggles of her main character, then DiFronzo’s labored weavings access a symbolic, transcendent temporality. Their weavings allude to the dream world or the archetypal realm, impossibly inexhaustible of meaning and nuance while examining larger notions surrounding death and birth. Kathryn Shriver uses mass-produced fixtures and handmade facsimiles of hardware associated with commercial home decor to examine the intersections of domesticity, taste, class, and both the intimate moments and little upsets embedded in home life. Along with using the geometry and repetition of beadwork, her practice investigates how a home can absorb a presence through what remains–hardware holes, hooks that once held clothes, indexical mark making of a former resident. Both artists play with the home’s psychological resonances, comforting and discomforting, to examine personal narratives while deepening a tacit knowledge of material."