Build, Body and Bone Vessel No. 40
Ceramic, 7.25 x 5.5 x 4.75", 2024
Jade Protection and Permanence
Video, 4:19, 2024
The Trouble with Cages
Mixed Media, 9.5 x 18 x 14", 2024
All I'll Ever Know
Digital collage, 38 x 22", 2022
Axis Gallery is proud to present Am I Home?, our 19th National Juried Exhibition featuring juror Kelly Lindner. From her essay about the exhibition:
What makes a home? Home is personal. Home is political. Home slips between real and imaginary, architecture and place, welcoming and threatening. During the pandemic, home took on more associations. Home was a refuge. Home was a prison.
Through the selected works for the 19th National Juried Exhibition at Axis, Am I Home? delves into ideas of self, community, migration, displacement and belonging. With 39 works by 27 artists, home hovers as a question. Where is home? What is home? Who is home? Am I going home? Am I leaving home? When am I home? Both overt and tangential, these questions in many ways feel tethered to the aftereffects of the pandemic and the isolation it produced, but they also reflect today’s global turmoil. Where do I now belong?
Several artists identify the slippage between house, home and shelter. Other works address the “endless and impossible journey toward home.” Following what Mackowitz and Lorenz describe as “existential homelessness,” artists such as Janice Nakashima, Dora Lisa Rosenbaum, and Joe Aki Ouye use imagery that proposes dislocation and displacement as a reflection of lived experiences. The necessity of seeking a home overrides any sense of permanence.
When do we know we’ve found home? In Elaine Nguyen’s video, Jade Protection and Permanence home is defined through an intimate portrait of a cultural tradition. As the artist struggles to get a jade bangle on to her wrist, her mother’s hands appear, helping to apply soap and molding her daughter’s hand to squeeze through the bracelet. Nguyen takes us on her personal journey to embrace her self-identity—one that traverses family, domesticity, and ritual. Ultimately, home is where you choose to belong.
Whether a personal, political, or fantastical journey, these artists succeed in guiding us towards our own definitions of home. Ask yourself: Am I home?
About the Juror
Kelly Lindner is the Art Galleries and Collections Curator for the University Galleries at California State University, Sacramento. She oversees exhibitions and public programs for the University Library Gallery, the Robert Else Gallery and the R.W. Witt Gallery. She also manages the Sacramento State Art Collection. Lindner has curated over 50 exhibitions since 2010, most recently solo projects with artists Rajkamal Kahlon, Kim Abeles, Won Ju Lim, and Stephen Kaltenbach. Prior to her appointment at Sacramento State, Lindner was the Director and Curator for the Jacki Headley University Gallery at California State University, Chico and an independent curator working with the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Artists’ Legacy Foundation. Lindner’s
curatorial practice centers on interdisciplinary approaches, collaboration, and site-responsive explorations in contemporary art. She holds an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.