Belongings
North Loop Gallery Williamstown, MA 2024
Answers to the question, “Where is home for you?” reveal that a sense of belonging is a composite of things, people, places, and memories. “To belong” may be a goal, but belonging, in its gerund noun form, is an active practice revisited, maintained, and altered through life. The works of Ariana Gomez, Alexandre Pépin, Phoebe Shuman-Goodier, and Rodell Warner point to the composite nature of belonging and the concomitant need to visualize memory and lineage to feel like one belongs. Perhaps a viewer might, in the images of the exhibition, find something to add to their own evolving sense of belonging.
Ariana Gomez attempts to portray a landscape where she may belong in her photography practice. For this exhibition, she layers cyanotype prints in space: hanging suspended from the ceiling, the images shift and flicker in and out of sight like things remembered. These printed photographs depict the San Marcos river’s surface where it wends its way through the eponymous city she now calls home: it is where she belongs right now, but is certainly not where she has always felt she belonged, nor where she will always belong, as she considers life beyond Texas and the southwest. With these soft images, Gomez captures the fluctuation and tenuousness of belonging, a feeling that can remain just out of reach, shifting under our gaze as we try to recollect or grasp a moment.
Altogether, the works in Belongings point to the composite nature of belonging and the concomitant need to visualize memory and lineage to feel like one belongs. Perhaps a viewer might, in the images of the exhibition, find something to add to their own evolving sense of belonging.
Ariana Gomez attempts to portray a landscape where she may belong in her photography practice. For this exhibition, she layers cyanotype prints in space: hanging suspended from the ceiling, the images shift and flicker in and out of sight like things remembered. These printed photographs depict the San Marcos river’s surface where it wends its way through the eponymous city she now calls home: it is where she belongs right now, but is certainly not where she has always felt she belonged, nor where she will always belong, as she considers life beyond Texas and the southwest. With these soft images, Gomez captures the fluctuation and tenuousness of belonging, a feeling that can remain just out of reach, shifting under our gaze as we try to recollect or grasp a moment.
Altogether, the works in Belongings point to the composite nature of belonging and the concomitant need to visualize memory and lineage to feel like one belongs. Perhaps a viewer might, in the images of the exhibition, find something to add to their own evolving sense of belonging.