What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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10 WHAT'S UP! JANUARY 19-25, 2020 At Home In The World Exhibit explores shelter, displacement JOCELYN MURPHY NWA Democrat-Gazette N early five years ago, when the current exhibition on display at Bentonville's 21c Museum Hotel began taking shape, museum director and chief curator Alice Gray Stites supposes its theme was perhaps not quite as polarizing a subject — at least, not in America. The more she reflected on it, though, the more aware she became of the issue's ubiquity. "Now, looking back, I don't know that there's ever been a time when there wasn't a movement of people seeking a better life somewhere, somehow," Stites says. "Refuge: Needing, Seeking, Creating Shelter" opened at the Bentonville museum in October following its debut at the boutique hotel chain's Kansas City location in 2018. The exhibition comprises paintings, photographs, model trains and boats, sculpture and multi-media works by artists from all over the world to explore the human experience of chosen and forced migration. "What's great about this show is that even though each artist has a specific place and story that they are thinking about, you can see a relationship to a global phenomena of people looking for refuge, people looking for better opportunities, people leaving their home," offers artist Naomi Safran-Hon. Safran-Hon's work included in the exhibition is a mixed-media piece that uses, among other tools, lace and cement to probe ideas about the home, intimacy, gender and the relationship between myth and truth. Inspired by a photograph she took of a dilapidated building in the Wadi Salib neighborhood, in her home region of Haifa in northern Israel, Safran-Hon re-creates the photo with paint on a canvas, cuts holes in the canvas, stretches lace over each gash, then pushes cement through the lace to become part of the image. "In a way, they need each other," the artist says of her chosen materials. "In my work, if you only have cement, it's going to fall apart. And if you have only lace, it's going to have gaps. So they actually enhance each other. The cement becomes flexible like the lace [before drying] and then the lace becomes hard and rigid like the cement. So they have a nice way where they kind of exchange attributes." Safran-Hon arrived at cement and lace partially out of necessity — needing a material to support the other — but once she saw the result of their synthesis, the contrast between the two suggested so much more in the work. The photographed buildings in the Haifa neighborhood were once homes before they were abandoned, not only by the residents, but also by the city and the state, in the late 1950s. It's the absence of people in Safran-Hon's work that reminds the viewer these structures, left to decay as a result of the violence in the area, once "WS: Room (two doors and window)" "If you think about it metaphorically, cement is associated with a tough material masculinity, the outside world, roughness. And then lace is kind of more feminine. In that way, the work also questions those boundaries — masculinity and femininity, tough and delicate," Israeli artist Naomi Safran-Hon says of her process. "I think in my work, the cement represents the outside forces. It invades; it literally pushes into a private space, into the home. And it does it through lace, which represents intimacy. We use lace as curtains, as doilies, as lingerie. It's like those delicate things, intimate things." (Courtesy Photo/21c Museum Hotels) FAQ 'Refuge: Needing, Seeking, Creating Shelter' WHEN — On display through September WHERE — 21c Museum Hotel in Bentonville COST — Free INFO — 21cmuseumhotels. com, naomisafranhon. com BENTONVILLE