home: an installation

THE TEMPORARY HOUSE OF THE IMAGE

“A house may be the first thing one paints following the figure of one’s parents. Artemis Alcalay has managed to house her overall work in this archetypal image.

Painted, photographed, upholstered, framed, bound, packaged, wrapped, covered with canvas, cloth, photo paper, yarns, rugs, embroidery, with paper-pulp limbs functioning as votive offerings, these houses whose interior one can only guess are situated in the inner space of a gallery; a green wall to wall carpet-green grass turns this into exterior space while generating a sense of homely warmth. The standardized surface of her houses becomes her personal canvas through which the artist takes a head-on approach to her entire work.”

Elizabeth Plessa

fabric V fabric I plaid empty house v
Alcalay’s house

The house becomes a symbolic crucible that embraces the human drama: it reframes it semantically in such a way that with each new form, a new aspect of human life arises as an archetype. Here resides the spiritual identity of the house: to transmute through art, experience into soul, thought into reflection, that which is alien to that which is our own.

-Marta Silvia Dios Sanz
-Translator, author