Michelle Robinson

Artist Statement

A domestic secret or trauma, once revealed, shifts the concept of home from the comfort of nostalgia into the realm of the uncanny: a place of intellectual uncertainty, where the once-familiar now feels unfamiliar. Once known, a secret can’t be unknown; it contaminates memories and intrudes upon relationships. Moreover, secrets revealed in the digital space can replicate and spread with infinite ease, copied, shared, and impossible to eradicate once established. This fracturing of self; this oscillation between states of longing and loss, presence and absence, sentimental memory and tainted knowledge, is the focus of You Are (Not) Here.

My practice is a combination of technological and traditional methods of making, creating digital composites of landscape and (un)homey objects. I use computer graphics to generate simulations of domestic furniture and structures, and hand-build dollhouse miniatures to reference a different timescale and physicality. By scaling up tiny, corrupted replicas of domestic objects and situating them, vulnerable, in a hostile environment, I turn the inside out. Like the miniature, the desert is a space of arrested time, and my proxy objects, whether simulated or built by hand, live out their lives as ruins in the landscape