Home Views

By Elin Spring and Suzanne Révy

“Home” is such a loaded word. Is it a place, a person, a pet? The truth is, the idea of home is unique to each of us. Just in time for the holidays, the Griffin Museum of Photography presents “Home Views”, an ambitious, building-wide exhibit assembling eleven solo shows with multi-faceted perspectives on the domestic environment. One of the most notable aspects of this exhibit is, with rare exception, there is nobody home. That’s right, most of the photographers explore exterior facades and ask viewers to infer meaning from their visual clues. A surprisingly intellectual exercise with accents of pathos and humor, “Home Views” will be in residence through December 5^th, 2021.

“Typology Grid – Arizona #02, 2019” from the series Where the Heart Is by Kathleen Tunnell Handel, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography.

The largest exhibit features twenty-seven images from Where the Heart Is: Portraits from Vernacular American Trailer and Mobile Home Parks, Kathleen Tunnell Handel’s meticulous examination of mobile home parks across ten States. Many of the images focus on individual properties and the quirky ways their residents personalize their properties. She has expanded this part of the project to include recorded histories, some of which are accessible through QR codes at the exhibit. Tunnell Handel’s abiding interest is in socioeconomic housing issues facing the nation. To that end, her typology grids offer a clever and stimulating slant on Bernd and Hilla Becher’s revolutionary industrial typologies from the last half of the twentieth century, simultaneously revealing basic forms and common functions while highlighting the unique details of each mobile home. Even comparing the grids from locations like California and Arizona is a mesmerizing puzzle.

Installation view of Twinhouses of the Great Northeast by Ira Wagner, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography (photo by Elin Spring).

From the series Twin Houses of the Great Northeast by Ira Wagner, courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

Typologies are revealing. The psychological messaging in Ira Wagner’s Twinhouses of the Great Northeast and Roberta Neidigh’s Property Line, each speak to an American sense of zealous individualism. Almost the opposite seems to be true in Colleen Mullins’ The Bone of Her Nose, wherein she underlines the tribalistic symbols of gentrification in San Francisco, broadcasting inclusion via similar hues of grey paint, modernist garage doors and san serif house numbers. Each of these photographers presents an intriguing social study that reveals itself from the curbside. Is it a leap to infer the origins of polarization that has overtaken our nation?

Installation view of Property Line by Roberta Neidigh, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography (photo by Elin Spring).

“White Brick and Green Stone” from the series Property Line by Roberta Neidigh, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography.

Installation view of The Bone of Her Nose by Colleen Mullins, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography (photo by Elin Spring, with apologies for gallery reflections).

“4207 26th Street” from the series The Bone of Her Nose by Colleen Mullins, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography.

“August 3, Shoreline” from the series Somewhere Else by Jane Szabo, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography.

Two photographers address the meaning of belonging in fantasies about home. In Somewhere Else, Jane Szabo composes images of mostly remote landscapes containing a modest home plastered with maps of other places. Each addresses her nagging desire to be in a different location and, true to their emotional tenor, Szabo’s homes sit like interlopers in a variety of tranquil surroundings. In another flight of fantasy, Joy Bush’s Places I Never Lived depicts home exteriors she photographs surreptitiously. Often featuring some physical barrier that attests to her secrecy, Bush solicits our complicity in imagining the lives of each home’s inhabitants.

“Old Harbor 1, Block Island, 2020” from the series Places I Never Lived by Joy Bush, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography.

“Lustron Stories” audio/video by Charles Mintz, installation photogrpah by Suzanne Révy

Typologies continue in video and book form with Charles Mintz’s project, Lustron Stories. The only pictures where the residents are in view, these environmental portraits feature both exterior and interior spaces of mid-twentieth century modern kit homes manufactured by the Lustron Corporation between 1948 and 1950. Targeted to G.I’s, approximately 2500 of these porcelain baked enamel steel houses were sold and around two thirds of them survive. Mintz’s video of portraits – made with a large format camera – accompanied by interviews of those still living in these homes, embraces the post-war architectural aesthetic of the mad men era and our evolving notions around signifiers of the American dream. 

“Home Sweet Home #16” by Anton Gautama, courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

From the series Mantel by Judi Iranyi, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy

Anton Gautama studied the domestic interiors of Indonesian homes in his series Home Sweet Home while Judi Iranyi, in response to the pandemic lock downs, created whimsical digital tableaus in her series Mantel. Though his prints would have benefited from being larger, Gautama’s interiors reveal a fascination with devotional displays, textures and cultural identities. Occasional clues, such as a wheelchair, raise questions around the presence of those who live there. Similarly, Iranyi’s mantels underscore the artist’s funky sense humor and acknowledge that fireplaces and mantels are no longer locations for reverence or ritual, but places for familial nostalgia and memorabilia. Both artists address the duality of interiors as places of comfort and safety on the one hand and constriction on the other hand, while harboring secret histories.

“Wanderings” by Melanie Walker, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy

From the series “There’s No Other Like Your Mother” by Brandy Trigueros, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

Exhibitors Melanie Walker and Brandy Trigueros integrate the human form into the notion of home. The photographic sources for Walker’s collaged sculptures are her own photographs made during her wanderings. Three larger figures sporting puppet like hands seem to saunter through a neighborhood of smaller houses. Some have comforting imagery such as an egg in a nest, drawn curtains or the light from a window, while others are more sinister with images of smokestacks or storm clouds, but all suggest a dreamlike trance of woven memories rooted in sense of psychological place. Brandy Trigueros explores the psychology of motherhood, and the dialog between her work and the rest of the exhibition allows these pictures to function as metaphors for home. Tucked away in the smaller Griffin Gallery, the salon installation is by turns comforting and disquieting. It opens with family pictures and ephemera, followed by a series of self-portraits which deliver viewers through the ups and downs of an emotional rollercoaster. A palpable sense of loss and desire permeates this work. Can we find a hearth in our mother… or in the idea of mother? And can a childless mother find “home”?

For more information about this exhibit and associated programming, go to: https://griffinmuseum.org/exhibitions/

Feature Image: “Down the Street – California #01, 2018” from the series Where the Heart Is by Kathleen Tunnell Handel, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography.