Your Head Is a Houseboat

Curated by Uttara Parekh

Artists: Ailyn Lee, Fanny Allie, Capucine Bourcart, Hamza Kirbas, Hanna Washburn, Marianna Peragallo, Meiting Li

April 13 – 27, 2023

The exhibition explores the tension and duality between the physical and psychological roles that forge the foundations for locations of refuge and comfort. It recognizes that the creation of a safe space could be as simple as a group of people with shared ideas coming together. The exhibition has a variety of symbolic components and storylines with social and occasional political resonances. The human body, its dimensions, the places it inhabits, the narratives that enclose it, and the theater or public and private spectacle that wraps around it all serve as the starting points for all artworks included in this exhibition. It aims to invoke visceral reactions within the body and highlight unconventional or otherwise strange relationships and interactions between humans and objects in the spectrum of the uncanny. Each work finds itself both above and below the scale of human likeness, causing perverse familiarity and cognitive dissonance. A dustpan and sweeping brush with human fingers, a stool topped with a bulbous textile structure, isolated Pinocchios, a ceramic human head, and more, can be found in Your Head is a Houseboat.

The artworks in Your Head Is a Houseboat were selected to elicit a variety of emotions, from glum to ecstatic, depending on one’s state of mind and each individual’s internal histories. Let's take some cues from these works: Life demands a bit of contortion, which is to say, a little imagination.