Sean Kernan: The Missing Pictures
Curated by Bruce Brown
May 16 - July 27, 2024
About the Show
Artist Statement:
My aim and hope is that viewers will find this work inside themselves, will collaborate and complete it. It invites one into a story, but it doesn’t tell just what the story is. The missing pictures are to be found in the mind.
The Missing Pictures
A House Built From Memory
In a field
a house,
old, empty,
the door
left open.
The house is a mystery that one enters and pieces together in a long, slow exploration: of the library, of an elegant parlor, a bedroom, a servant’s sparse bedstead. A door that says No Entry leads up the attic stairs where one can find uniforms, oars and riding boots, costumes, banners, letters, books … and that mysterious wheelchair they said was FDR’s. Sunlight filters through a curtain of tattered American flags and sets the dust dancing.
When it's time to leave one descends to the ground floor and finds the light has completely changed, become wintry and cold. And snow has begun to fall. The visitor hurries out, shuts the door tightly and trudges away across the field. Then he stops and looks back. There are his footsteps in the snow just behind him. Farther back by the house they are gone.
And in a second-floor bedroom window … light.
(The house) has been broken into pieces inside me; a room here, a room there, and then a piece of a hallway that doesn’t connect these two rooms, but is preserved as a fragment, by itself. In this way, it is all dispersed inside me.
Ranier Maria Rilke
Preview the Exhibition
(CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE)
