Heather Huston: January 2010

Saturday, January 16, 2010

This is one of the houses near completion as seen in the Contextual show at the Untitled Art Society in Calgary. The top image is a detail from the piece. The box to the right has a sensor that when tripped, causes a light to come on.

Artist Statement

I have had a longstanding interest in the mundane and finding ways to re-represent it to the viewer in a way that articulates the sense of strangeness that occurs when the familiar is seen out of context. I am interested in the miniature and its inherent reading as a nostalgic and idyllic structure for the eye to consume. If we look to the miniature for the ideal, we find instead in my work a peculiar reflection of everyday living. They are outside the cute, exaggeratedly symbolic domain of the dollhouse and instead exist in a reality where the physical becomes psychological. They open up questions about the ability for interiors and objects to retain the emotional residue of our actions.

I am drawn to the flux of buildings in states of construction, demolition and restoration and in creating ones of my own that are at once caught in the transitory state of becoming or dissolving. The organized chaos of what we, especially as Calgarians, see as construction is halted and gently brought into contact with that of the natural world, a reminder of what is lost as we gain space and property.

Heather Huston

Saturday, January 16, 2010

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