Page 22 - SLO Visitors Guide Winter 2023

San Luis Obispo
San Luis Obispo Museum of Art presents Home/Work
Exhibition features notable contemporary artists reflecting on domestic spaces
The San Luis Obispo Museum
of Art (SLOMA) is pleased
to present Home/Work, a group exhibition that reflects on domestic space, the way in which we create division between work life and personal life, and the relation-
ships that each of us have with our homes. The exhibition, running until March 5, 2023, brings together work by fourteen notable con-
temporary artists looking at their own domestic spaces, historical
moments from women moving the political dial to the COVID-19 pandemic that shifted ideas of the home, and the sanctity of having secure shelter. In doing so, these artists bring forth questions about our individual and collective expe- riences of home.
Home/Work includes new works by emerging and established artists, including: Brandy Eve Allen, Zalika Azim, Kate Barbee, Phoebe Boswell, Andrea Bowers, Allana Clarke, Geoffrey Chadsey, Judy Chicago, Woody de Othello, Mary Kelly, Emmett Moore, Sophia Nar- rett, Greg Scott, and Chiffon Thom- as. The works on view reflect on the unique and intimate experiences of the artists and invite us to consider how we achieve balance between work and and home life. This show invites the public to consider their own experiences, reflecting on the overlap of home and work, and all that is in between.
From literal depictions of household spaces to abstract sculptures, the exhibition explores the theme of home in various forms and mediums. Works by Andrea Bowers, Judy Chicago, and Mary Kelly explore the domestic through a feminist lens, offering perspectives on women’s efforts
to gain equality. With Peace Is the
Only Shelter and We Don’t Want
to Set the World on Fire, Mary Kelly restages a protest by Women’s Strike for Peace, a group of women activists in the 1960s, who used
the slogans depicted here in their campaign for nuclear disarma- ment. This pivotal effort brought the stay-at-home mother into a po- sition of political power that helped bring about the historic signing of a Test Ban Treaty in 1962. This work invites us to look at the way that women’s departure from the home helped to inform the most impor- tant social movements of our time.
The home, of course, is not always a place of happiness, and Trinidadian-American artist Allana Clarke will present “My Mouth,” an abstract sculpture that questions the visible and invisible violence that can emerge from the home. The work is inspired by a ritual Clarke experienced as a child, and which she describes as “indoc- trinating me into a world that is anti-Black,” the use of hair bonding glue. For the exhibition Clarke has created a sculpture that she begins by pouring large amounts of hair bonding glue onto a flat mesh surface, and then pulling, pinching, twisting, and pushing the glue, like one might do to hair. The result- ing work looks at the way she was
22 WINTER 2023
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