Various woods
Foreclosure considers the vulnerability of our dreams, and the personal, emotional and cultural significance of objects.
The narrative is the 2008 foreclosure “crisis”. I put the word crisis in quotes because in common usage it suggests the unexpected or unpredictable, which this “crisis” did not seem to be.
When evicted from your home your furniture is put out on the street. At first I thought there was a resemblance between evicted furniture and the piles of furniture put out on the streets of New Orleans after Katrina. Then I realized the difference is that the latter had been discarded while the former is saved in the hope of finding another home.
The immediate critique is of government for its claim that it acts for the people when it patently acts only for the rich few.
The furniture is mostly remakes of furniture built and used by idealist communities, and specifically mostly from the Mount Lebanon Shakers. There are also remakes of pieces from my own home. My intention in using “utopian” furniture is twofold. In the first place it emphasizes that, though in most cases evicted furniture is likely inexpensive, and even of poor material quality, its value, as pieces of home, is without measure. Secondly it addresses my broader concern, which is that the hegemony of neoliberal market-oriented materialism has evicted the possibility of imagining a different way of living. Any proposal for an alternative society is branded as fanatic.
In Greenpoint, New York a man was evicted, not for foreclosure in this case, but because his building was condemned. He lived on the street with his furniture, selling pieces to sustain life. I hear the house was demolished and he now lives with his furniture on the empty lot. The furniture in Foreclosure is scattered, but coalesces around the bed to form a temporary place.
Foreclosure has been exhibited with work by Harmony Hammond in an installation we titled Angle of Repose. The Angle of Repose is a term used by engineers to describe the angle at which a granular material comes to rest when piled. The pile is at rest but the addition of further material will destabilize it and precipitate descent. We chose the title because we feel this precarious repose reflects a truth about the condition in or under which we live. For me it describes my dis-ease with the contrast between the comfort and ease of my personal life and the despicable mess which is the world on which my comfortable domain depends.