mr. berger’s original shell

title

Mr. Berger’s Original Shell, hook rug sculpture, custom table, audio, 2016

statement

This work clearly combines labor, love, and loneliness/solitude. Labor can be observed through the traditional masculine and feminine use of craft. The feminine craft is found in the hook rugged home, a laborious and time consuming process. The masculine craft is found within the Popular Mechanics aesthetic of the table. With both types of craft, the work emphasizes sentimentality’s agendered position by disregarding a dynamic duality of feminine and masculine and instead presenting a unified whole. Love can be found in the work’s use of materials and ideas. This hook rugged home is presented as the dream home. Bachelard states, “This home is a sort of airy structure that moves about on the breath of time...as through it could greet us every day of our lives in order to give us confidence in life.”

The house broadcasts Muzak and calm, while chiming every fifteen minutes to remind us about the inevitable passage of time.

Like a Kinkade painting, this love is also found in the glowing windows. Glowing windows say welcome. They say all is well. They say that someone’s waiting, someone cares enough to turn a light on. With these glowing windows the question of loneliness and solitude is asked as well. Are the glowing windows a beacon of loneliness, such as the case of Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, who turned on each light in his mansion as a way to draw Daisy’s eye from across the bay? Or are the glowing windows a sign of enlightened contemplation, indicating a place of imagination and personal growth?