Home: a group exhibition

What do you think of when you think of home? Do you think of a field, or a city? A person, a scent? Is home a song, a memory, or a feeling?

This July, the residents of Greenhut found themselves thinking about home while away from their own. The works in this exhibition pay homage to the natural world (earth as home), contemplate the body (home as the self), and embrace the relationships to the people and places through which we find and feel at home.

Kathleen Granados’ work reanimates discarded, used, and/or overly loved materials into dynamic assemblages that contemplate care for one another and one's self. Through her soft sculptures, the artist utilizes crochet, a method of making associated with the home-made, to create organic, hive-like forms which recall the wasps and hornets nests found in nature. In addition to crochet, Granados utilizes found textiles, domestic objects, and family photographs to create mixed media pieces to explore the many facets of what defines home.

Onnika Gullickson’s poetry contemplates themes of identity, memory, and sense of place through lyrical wit and poignant visuals. Gullickson has recently utilized the medium of collage to juxtapose her photography and words with found materials; ranging from magazine cut outs to dirt from the Greenhut property. The occasion of the residency has prompted Gullickson to reflect on her relationship to her grandfather’s home, a rural property in upstate New York, rife with pastoral beauty and a vague sense of loss. Through text, Gullickson renders vignettes that reflect upon her personal definitions of home. 

Brooklyn-based artist Jenny Alice Watts’ residence at Greenhut has been nothing short of a homecoming. Harvard is her hometown, and she has spent this period reacquainting herself with the place that shaped her. Watts' interdisciplinary practice of songwriting, music production, photography and film culminated with a wistful homage to child-like joy, in the shape of a music video (recorded on property) for her original song, Stupid Little Bird. The characters created by Watts recall a youthful sense of wonder through the form of six joyful bird-puppets, balanced with a mature sense of despair through one humanoid puppet who shows one's tendency to watch, wait, and wallow. 

Boston-based writer Karolína Kristína Chorváth creates poetry, prose, and sculpture that ruminate on themes of beauty, loss, and possibility. Through her poetry, Chorváth shares deeply personal moments which describe ecological beauty, intimacy with the self and the other, and the relationship between oneself and their body. Through Chorváth’s recent foray into sculpture, she utilizes materials laden with meaning: crystals sourced from a chandelier from the old Boston Ritz Carlton, her own hair, a Cartier box, and her injection vials from a medication which retails at $30,000 when purchased without health insurance. Through these marriages of material, Chorváth’s sculptures present thoughtful juxtapositions of luxury in opposition to the fragility of the human body.  

Valentina Di Liscia is a culture writer and journalist whose recent research explores the work of Mexican artist Helen Escobedo (1934–2010). Inspired by Escobedo’s monumental, site-specific sculptures and by her legacy as both a trailblazer and a polemical figure within Mexican contemporary art history, she is investigating the artist’s relationship to notions of home, architecture, and belonging. In an effort to deepen her research-based practice, Di Liscia created watercolors and sketches in homage to Escobedo’s body of work, presented here alongside photographs of books and other reference materials.