Image: Chantin Akiyama, Play, 2019. Sound: Brandon Snyder, excerpts from Hammock and Children, 2019.
Courtesy of the artists and BAAA Gallery.
BAAA Gallery is
pleased to present Chantine Akiyama and Brandon Lincoln Snyder’s multi-media
installation *home*. Akiyama and Snyder’s creative collaborations began in 2018 with the
production of Chantine’s master’s thesis: “Sights and sounds of home: An
experimental conversation between seeing and hearing in architecture,”
performed at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in January, 2019. Akiyama
and Snyder share interests in expressing the mundane, spiritual, affectionate,
and joyous through sound, space, and visuals.
What is “home”? How does it feel? What does it sound like? What does it
look like? Is it a place, a person, an object that makes home *home*? And how
steadfast does home cling to us? In a transient city like Boston, young
professionals and students are constantly moving. No place or community is
permanent, yet the idea of home is one that is familiar and real—one that we
can call to our memory readily.
As we grow up, we often leave our first home, the one of our childhood.
Our physical bodies leave that physical space, but the emotional connection to
home is tethered to a deeper part of ourselves. Not just a geographic
coordinate but a domain both physical and emotional, home is simultaneously
always—and never—changing. Imbued in furniture, beds, utensils, doors, and
carpets are routines and rhythms around which our most vulnerable selves learn
to dwell. To feel the grain of wood on a bed frame, or catch the faint smell of
a carpet, is to unearth forgotten childhood memories.
What has home become?
What Akiyama and Snyder have prepared in
the gallery is not a home, but a dream of home. Laid out in the space are not
pieces of any particular home, but abstracted home-objects, coated and blurred
with the ways one might have remembered and forgotten his or her childhood. Painted
recountings of history are overlaid by semi-opaque representations of heritage
and significance. What peculiarities has someone tuned out, or remembered
clearly?
The walls and furniture are lined with a
fuzzy veneer, alluding to a blurriness like the one created by squinting one’s
eyes. In the space where specific memories of home are lost, nostalgia
constructs and imagines the home that one might wish to have had. Music will
play throughout this dreamy *home*,
both an underscore and main attraction to the experience. The aural, tactile,
and visual planes are all equal component of this work. In this exhibition, the artists invite audience to not only feel
the presence but also the hiddenness of *home*.
Chantine Akiyama is a curator of
atmospheres from Los Angeles, CA. Trained in performing arts for 17 years, and
more recently as an architect, she seeks to craft spaces in such a way as to
evoke nostalgia and affection in the viewer. She is Master of Architecture candidate
at Harvard GSD and holds a Bachelor of Engineering from MIT.
Brandon Lincoln Snyder celebrates
the mundane and sacred through music. In 2018, he studied music journalism in
Darmstadt and Berlin on a John Knowles Pain Travel Fellowship. He received his
Bachelor of Arts in Music at Harvard University, where he studied composition
with Chaya Czernowin and Steven Kazuo Takasugi. He has been commissioned by The
Harvard Group for New Music, the Bach Society Orchestra, the Brattle Street
Chamber Players, Face the Music, and Nebula Ensemble. Brandon is currently the
assistant producer at Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, CA, as well as a
teacher at the Orange County School of the Arts in Santa Ana, California.
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This exhibit was curated and prepared by BAAA Gallery. Graphic works are done by BAAA BOOKS, the gallery’s in-house design studio founded to serve artists with photo/video documentation, poster, catalog, book, and exhibition design.