Lately I’ve been thinking about the meaning of “home” — both the physical place and where we fit or feel at home in other aspects of our lives.
So somehow it seems appropriate I stumbled across Manufacturing Home by Amy Eckert, which opened yesterday at the MPLS Photo Center in Minneapolis.
“This project began in 1999 with the idea of documenting the process of building homes in assembly-line factories,” Eckert says. “Can you mass-produce a sense of home? By focusing on brand new, factory-built mobile homes I could observe and comment on the strategies employed by manufacturers to make them feel homey and appealing to buyers. I found it very interesting, for instance, that someone thought a picture of a shipwreck on a prop TV or a rifle next to a bed might help sell a home.”
The resulting images are at once both inviting and disorienting. According to prominent novelist and art critic Lynne Tillman, Eckert’s works in “Manufacturing Home” are both perturbations to and affirmations of those notions of homes as “castles and dreams.”
- from event page on mnartists.org
I’m not convinced it totally succeeds, but I see what she’s getting at.
Slideshow on amyeckertphoto.com.
