May 2018
Sunset Art Studio and Residency
Dallas, TX
This Museum was a participatory installation created of personal objects that had not been used or touched for at least a year, donated by people from the Dallas, Texas, community. They were objects that had lost their functional value and so had transformed into a formal shell, marking just the meaning of their physical connections. As community members considered what objects they had not used, in order to donate them, those perceptual memories by people from different walks of life helped define a collective idea of home. In this one-day installation, different elusive perceptions of lost touch were brought together through the gathering of things that merged their related perceptual memories and the collective idea of lost but imagined physical connection.
The critical moment of ambiguity in which the object hesitates between functional and “museum-value” was a special moment for thinking of the objects’ transition to the potential new role of mementos. At some point in the future, these objects may very well become “antique:; they might well be handed down to others. But at the moment of the installation, they activated the sensation of how our homes have unwittingly become museums for them, and for us.