Home Sweet Home

(James Castle, Untitled (blue house) 20th c.)

I’m just back home after 10 days of subletting. My apartment feels foreign. A friend suggested I pee in the corner to reclaim my territory.

I’ve spent the past hour positing things around the house in a faux-haphazard way in an effort to re-create my home. It’s fiction, really. Maybe home is a place we make up.

Businesses do it all the time: they create an environment to remind you of somewhere that has made you feel comfortable. Or maybe it’s an environment you fantasize about. Really, it’s all Epcott center mini-worlds.

And I’m thinking art does the same. It’s a place we make or see that feels right, but it’s all made up. Narratives and portraits, but also abstract images. Whatever our intention, it’s an order, a metaphor, a gesture we approve of, whether bleak or dreamy. Either way, it’s entirely personal, and comes off, from an objective standpoint, as arbitrary.