I’m Sorry If This Isn’t What You Needed, But I’m Giving it to You Anyway (Unsolicited Advice)
Materials: Acrylic and oil paint, insulation foam, cardboard, ceramic tile, resin, found household objects, photographs, textiles, audio, and mixed media.
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About the Project
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I'm Sorry If This Isn't What You Needed, But I'm Giving It Anyways (Unsolicited Advice) transformed the ATM Gallery—a former automated teller kiosk in the middle of a commercial parking lot—into a temporary domestic interior. Constructed from painting, insulation foam, cardboard, tile, found household materials, and collected ephemera, the installation questioned where home begins and how it persists when permanence becomes impossible.
Completed while helping members of my own family navigate homelessness, the project emerged from the tension between private care and public visibility. Rather than recreating a home, the installation assembled fragments of one: curtains, insulation, drawings, photographs, shelves, and improvised architectural forms. The work embraced instability, allowing seams, repairs, and provisional construction to remain visible. The installation forms part of my ongoing body of work, Longing is Just Our Word for Knowing, which combines painting, assemblage, ethnographic media, and community storytelling to investigate home as something relational rather than architectural. Across these projects, acts of assembling, taping, patching, carrying, and rebuilding become both material processes and ways of understanding belonging. Although temporary, the installation asked viewers to slow down and enter an unexpected space of care within an everyday commercial landscape, transforming a site of financial transaction into one of reflection, memory, and shelter. |
