Unmade begins with a gap—the moment when an image no longer matches what it is meant to represent, and meaning starts to slip. Here, meaning is never fixed; it fractures, shifts, and reappears altered. Rather than offering clarity, the works in this exhibition assert ambiguity as a condition—one in which the domestic interior becomes unhomely and quietly charged.
What was once familiar transforms through repetition and repression, becoming something other. Shadows lengthen. Objects shift their roles; a window opens not onto reassurance, but onto fantasy, anxiety, and latent desire. In this terrain, intimacy collapses into exposure, and the domestic becomes a charged arena where observer and observed are held in uneasy balance.
Against this symbolic backdrop, the exhibition turns inward toward the domestic theater of Xi’an Kim. Born and raised in Korea, Kim approaches the home from a distinct register, describing her still lifes as “a small theater inside the home.” In Object 402, a bird-like form hovers above a decorative plate, its vivid orange body at once animated and strangely inert. Drawing from everyday objects, her compositions unfold through relational tension rather than overt symbolism. Her titles reflect this restraint, marked only by their still-life origin. Plates, vessels, fruit, and figurines are arranged as if cast into roles, each object carrying an emotional residue shaped by personal relationships and memory.
In Object 400, a jar, a pine branch, and a figurine stand among ambiguous, furniture-like forms, arranged with careful restraint. These objects do not explain themselves. Instead, they speak through proximity and balance, their relationships reflecting the complexities of intimacy, care, and emotional inheritance. Kim’s paintings are deeply personal without being confessional. Affection—particularly toward maternal figures—filters through choice and arrangement rather than narrative. Still-life elements become vessels for memory, holding psychological space and rendering emotion as something rehearsed quietly, stored rather than performed.
The domestic space becomes uncanny not through spectacle, but through what is withheld, repeated, or left unresolved. In Dustin Emory’s paintings, this condition comes into sharp focus. Working in grayscale, Emory fractures perspective through horizontal bands, shelving, and layered planes. In the works presented in the exhibition, cups, crumpled paper, and glassware are rendered with forensic clarity, yet drained of warmth or narrative resolution. Figures hover at the margins—partially obscured, their presence implied rather than confirmed.
These everyday objects do not settle into still life; their precarious arrangements suggest disturbance rather than order. Emory’s compositions resist a single point of entry, compelling the viewer to scan the image rather than rest within it, and reinforcing a quiet, internal tension that permeates the domestic scene.
The home becomes a site of internal surveillance—a space where the self is both occupant and witness, caught within an atmosphere of quiet pressure. Observation is not external or authoritative, but internalized, folded into posture, repetition, and the weight of being present; it is within this condition that Romina Bassu’s paintings register what happens when domestic space begins to thin, and presence gives way to absence. In Phantom, a sealed box releases a single braid of hair that spills outward. Hair—often tied to intimacy, identity, and the endurance of the body—appears here as a trace without an owner. The box suggests preservation and control, yet the escaping braid disrupts any sense of closure. What remains is neither fully hidden nor fully revealed, but caught in a state of quiet emergence.
In Still Life, the human body enters the scene in a precarious and unsettling way. A woman hangs from a clothing rack, her body suspended as if absorbed into the structure meant to support garments. Wearing a coat, she appears less as an autonomous figure than as something displayed or held in place. Here Bassu suggests identity as something worn, assumed, or temporarily inhabited. The rack, rigid and orderly, becomes an armature that supports the body rather than the other way around.
This inversion quietly unsettles expectations around femininity and visibility. The figure is present yet destabilized, caught between subject and object—a condition that resonates with Brittney Leeanne Williams’s paintings, where the act of seeing and the female body are tightly intertwined, and vision itself becomes a point of tension rather than a neutral vantage.
In The Eye Between 1, a figure folded inward in saturated red hues delineates the shape of an eye suspended within a darkened landscape of water and trees. Cradled inside this form, the body is both protected and exposed. The eye does not function as a symbol of authority or surveillance, but as a site of containment—a space where intimacy exists within visibility rather than in opposition to it.
In The Arch of an Eye, Back, and Lemon Tree, the eye becomes architectural: an opening the body must pass beneath. Faceless and anonymous, the figure stands poised between shelter and exposure. Williams’s use of red cuts through the surrounding stillness, transforming perception into a visceral experience. In her work, seeing is never neutral; it is emotional, embodied, and quietly consuming, shaping how the body is held, revealed, and understood.
At the core of Unmade is not intrusion, but revelation. The exhibition is concerned with what surfaces when the mechanisms of comfort fail: the abject folded into soft furnishings, emotional fractures hidden behind architectural forms, and memories embedded in the most ordinary of things. The uncanny domestic object is not monstrous; it is subtle and displaced—a cup left overturned, a gesture mirrored without origin, a voice seeming to arrive from another room when no one is there.
Unmade brings these practices together to consider the home as a site of quiet disquiet—where meaning loosens, familiarity mutates, and the boundaries between safety and exposure blur. It is within this fragile threshold that the exhibition unfolds, inviting viewers to linger in uncertainty and to reconsider how intimacy, observation, and memory shape the spaces we believe we know.
