CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing) announces “Home and Home: New York in My Life,” an exhibition of photographs by Satomi Shirai. These seven works reveal, in boldly playful as well as subtle ways, a newly arrived immigrant’s strategies to create a sense of home and to discover what those strategies are. From the outset, CRS has sought to provide a creative and spiritual home to artists and seekers from all over the world, and we believe that this exhibition speaks directly to our mission and the experience of so many members of our community.
The exhibition will open on October 19, 2015 and be on display through November 28, 2015. An opening reception with the artist will take place on Friday, October 23, 2015 from 7:30 – 9:30 pm.
While the photographs in this exhibition look like documentary-style records of the often messy and alien life that an immigrant lives prior to acquiring furnishings and fully settling in (does an immigrant ever fully settle in?), the photographs are actually meticulously staged with a highly controlled mastery of mis-en-scene and craft. This creates a tension between order and chaos, reality and artifice, into which the artist places herself and her own child and friends as models, challenging our initial impulse to label the life depicted as disordered. The more we look, the more we recognize objects, symbols, behaviors, relationships that give meaning and context to the home depicted. We recognize that we carry home within us and carry on a never-ending process of using our minds in diverse and complex ways to anchor ourselves and project our sense of home into our habitat, making it our own even in the midst of constant change.
