Eastern District is proud to host Home, Away from Home, a solo-exhibit of photographs by multi-media artist Justine Reyes.
Opening Reception 7-10pm Friday May 15th 2009 sponsored by ASAHI.
EASTERN DISTRICT. 43 BOGART STREET
Home, Away from Home draws on images from two bodies of work, “Home” and “Away from Home.” Ms. Reyes spent the past six years photographing her immediate family - her mother and two uncles. This series pairs their portraits with views of empty interior spaces in the house where they all live. In many of the photographs where the figures of her family are physically present a lonely emptiness and unease hovers, often more insistantly than in the vacant spaces. The family is seen engaging in the everyday activities of cleaning, eating, watching TV, doing nothing in particular. The viewer is forced to adopt Reyes' vision, incorporating the artist's own fears of losing her family and trying to capture the moments slipping by with increasing speed as they get older. Ms. Reyes' beautifully sad photographs focus on age, aging, loneliness and isolation, and the fragility of life and family bonds through her stark depictions of details such as her uncle's broken nose.
Home follows the series, “My Uncle Vinnie” (2005), the image of the empty bedroom representing Uncle Vinnie and his absence. After Uncle Vinnie's death Ms. Reyes took numerous trips with her family. Away from Home documents the hotel rooms that became grand stages for dramas that never quite unfold. She focuses on the subtle underlying tension created by dislocation. By staging her family in foreign spaces, costumed to have the look and feel of domestic comfort, Ms. Reyes begins to draw relationships between “Home” and “Away from Home”, both literally and metaphorically, as if Ms. Reyes is preparing herself for her family's journey to the after life through depictions of anxiety and confliction. The images convey no sense of time or place, but only that there is a journey and that the journey requires preparation.
EASTERN DISTRICT. 43 BOGART STREET - L TRAIN TO MORGAN AVENUE.
