Home is a domestic living space that offers artists the chance not just to show their work, but to make it survive when surrounded by the detritus of a genuine home. Unlike a gallery space where it often seems that life itself has been removed to showcase work, Home contains life along with the work.
Home challenges the artists and the work to stop those who pass by, to stand out from, or comment/question its surroundings.
Home is a natural reaction. By choosing to present art in domesticity it is attempting to bring back the unattainable that much of today’s art has become.
"You put it very well, a lot better than myself. I think what you say about Value, the way things are presented giving them more or less value, is a part of the whole thing that interests me a lot, and in a way that in my own small way want to challenge. Because I have seen an awful lot of work that has been put in the gallery environment that I just did not buy into. I like going to galleries with relations, say my mum and dad, contemporary art spaces, and they kind of bow down to what they see before them as something that must have importance or meaning, even though they just don't have any idea what that importance or meaning is, because there it is before them in this gallery space. They assume the reason they don't get it is their own inadequacy. Whatever it is they are seeing is special, it must be, because it is in a gallery. So I might get asked what it is about what we are looking at that makes it special, you know, because I am the one that went to art school, and a lot of the time it just is not special, not important, not meaningful. I am aware that might be the point with some work, and so I tread carefully, but deep down I just feel that with the huge contemporary art institutions booming, the smaller ones grasp at mediocrity to fill the time and space. When eventually I see some work that really truly I think is important, and I just cannot stop going on about it, reading about it, the artist, the life it has had, then I remember what it is about art that I love. When something gets to you. Because for the most, you forget."
Scott Robertson in email conversation with Matthew Pitts.
"You put it very well, a lot better than myself. I think what you say about Value, the way things are presented giving them more or less value, is a part of the whole thing that interests me a lot, and in a way that in my own small way want to challenge. Because I have seen an awful lot of work that has been put in the gallery environment that I just did not buy into. I like going to galleries with relations, say my mum and dad, contemporary art spaces, and they kind of bow down to what they see before them as something that must have importance or meaning, even though they just don't have any idea what that importance or meaning is, because there it is before them in this gallery space. They assume the reason they don't get it is their own inadequacy. Whatever it is they are seeing is special, it must be, because it is in a gallery. So I might get asked what it is about what we are looking at that makes it special, you know, because I am the one that went to art school, and a lot of the time it just is not special, not important, not meaningful. I am aware that might be the point with some work, and so I tread carefully, but deep down I just feel that with the huge contemporary art institutions booming, the smaller ones grasp at mediocrity to fill the time and space. When eventually I see some work that really truly I think is important, and I just cannot stop going on about it, reading about it, the artist, the life it has had, then I remember what it is about art that I love. When something gets to you. Because for the most, you forget."
Scott Robertson in email conversation with Matthew Pitts.
Ordinary objects can appear more interesting when placed in an art gallery. In a way they can be projected with a beauty that would otherwise be missed. It has become too easy now, the simple formula of placing something in a gallery space, an alchemist, turning not into gold but art.
"I think at times there is an unspoken assumption that the more conceptual or ideas driven an art work is, the more removed, unobtainable, or distinct from everyday life it should be. That somehow it can't survive in everyday life and has to be presented in a certain arena for it to function, or have value."
Matthew Pitts in email conversation with Scott Robertson.
"I think at times there is an unspoken assumption that the more conceptual or ideas driven an art work is, the more removed, unobtainable, or distinct from everyday life it should be. That somehow it can't survive in everyday life and has to be presented in a certain arena for it to function, or have value."
Matthew Pitts in email conversation with Scott Robertson.
Home is a project organised, funded and curated by Scott Robertson, whose home is Home
