NOVEMBER 2022
NORTH GALLERY
Domestic Architecture of the Uncanny | Mandy Bernard
This installation and exhibit of soft sculptures serve as textile-based examinations of Bernard’s personal processing and regeneration within the past two and a half years, with a focus on shifts that have taken place inside the home. Designed to be the Alaskan counterpart to the installation Bernard created while on residency at Konstmuseet i Skövde in the fall of 2021, this exhibit will feature a corresponding fiber installation and new soft sculptures alongside work that was created in Sweden.
Artist Statement
Over the past two years, I have grown increasingly fatigued from ongoing adaptation to our new reality. At some point, I recognized a strange dissonance occurring within myself: one of exponential dread tempered with abject numbness. Curiously, this combination seemed to create an unexpected corollary of altered perception. Commonplace objects within my home—which had become a place of both refuge and suffocating confinement—seemed to acquire new, at times sinister, characteristics. I found myself reassessing my surrounding personal possessions and furnishings, and determined them to be wholly familiar yet distinctly uncanny.
This interior discord reflected what was happening outside of my four walls, as well as what was beginning to happen within my frame of mind. Over the past 2+ years much of society has reevaluated its standards of living, the things that are most important to us. It’s as if we’ve all had a collective moment of, in the words of David Byrne, “This is not my beautiful house.”
The aftereffects of this experience will undoubtedly unravel for years to come. This installation and exhibit of soft sculptures serve as textile-based examinations of my own personal processing and regeneration within this period.
Domestic Architecture of the Uncanny is supported, in part, by a grant from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
This exhibit could not have developed without the direct assistance, encouragement, and support from the following people: Tomas Asplund Gustafsson, Mette Muhli, Asia Freeman, Berith Stennabb, Donna Carr, Elissa Pettibone, Joey Lothian, Andrew Cutting, Katie Ione Craney, Sara Tabbert, Karinna Gomez, Hans Hallinen.
And David Bernard, most of all.
