Sep 30 - Oct 22

Opening reception
Saturday, September 30, 5-7pm

Taryn Tomasello
All The Homes I've Ever Had

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We want so badly to protect those we love. To take away their pain, prevent them from hurting. Laws prevent harm.

The Minister of Loneliness.
Youth Agency.
Children’s Defense Fund.

What do a shelf, a survival bunker, a playground slide, and a wreath have in common? The inevitable failure to protect our children.

The inherited situation.
An intergenerational nervous system.
What if we are made up of all the things we come in contact with, all those we touch?

There is something about safety that just doesn’t feel right. Like, it doesn’t get to the real desire: suspension of time, a soft landing.
Egg cartons, bubble wrap, mattresses, pillows, packing peanuts, leashes, harnesses, chains, fences, locks, regulations, limits, gates.
The desire to protect as a form of love. But then protection becomes control.
The holding of a hand so they don’t fall over the edge when they lean in to take a look.
Are you holding the hand or are you grasping the wrist?

Do you know the feeling you have when you wake up after falling in a dream?
It all comes down to liability.

Mary Ann Vecchio, the living subject of the iconic photo of the Kent State Massacre, was 14 years old. She had left her family and was sleeping in fields and on people’s couches. She just happened to be at Kent State University as the Anti-War Protests erupted. She had just met the person who was shot. They were talking.

Possibly this is about that feeling you have when you find a nest on the ground. It’s been vacated, and maybe displaced. It’s no longer a home, no longer useful, no longer doing what it was meant to do, but the echo of its purpose still resonates through the form.


Bio

Taryn Tomasello (b.1982 in Boston, MA) is a conceptual artist living and working in Portland, OR. Her practice spans numerous disciplines including visual arts, writing, curatorial studies and creativ research. Tomasello works with the aspects of social material that resist confinement and remain in the margins of our awareness.

Blending communion, aesthetic, and artifact, she sees art as a way out of our crisis of imagination. She is trying to see both a future and a future past. Tomasello has shown across the United States and internationally. However, her most meaningful work often exists outside the confines of traditional art spaces and beyond the reach of conventional documentation.