INSIDERS
Outfitted with a lifetime of interacting with the domestic realm, object makers are especially primed to subvert our relationship with it. The artists and designers who make up the Insiders are especially interested in this conjunction, creating a fantastical tableau vivant in which the things around us are anything but passive. Their objects’ elaborate interfaces and aestheticized functions unlock a simulation of hyper-domesticity that teases and makes user satisfaction a curious feat. Together, this group presents a funhouse of daring meta-objects that urge us to think about our personal, everyday surroundings and how they affect human interiority.
It escapes no one that the relationship between people and their homes has been tested to an extreme in recent history, given that lockdowns imposed prolonged time indoors, often in isolation, which increased loneliness and dependency on our screens. But this time also gave us a collective sense of introspection, and the Insiders’ objects bring us back to an embodied reality, where we animate the things around us as characters and companions. These makers destabilize domestic ideals with concerted agility to investigate the human-to-object relationships we take for granted. With dissidence and wonder, they reveal our private environments as a surreal state, a stage on which their furnishings—and sculptures of furnishing—play to our dreams, desires, and insecurities.
Insiders include: Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, MJ Tyson, Liam Lee, Katie Stout, Carl D'Alvia, Francesca DiMattio, Roxanne Jackson, Anne Libby, Collin Leitch, Linda Nguyen Lopez, Hugh Hayden
