Chantine Akiyama and Brandon Snyder: *home*

April 28 - May 19, 2019




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. 













Chantine Akiyama:
︎ chantine


Brandon Snyder:
︎ brandonlincolnsnyder
https://www.brandonlincolnsnyder.com


︎ Did I Steward Authority Well?
- Difference Tones - May 2019

written by Brandon Snyder


MEET THE ARTISTS:
Chantine Akiyama and Brandon Snyder
Sunday, May 19, 2:00-5:00pm


Exhibition Flyer ︎ Download



Mark