Nowhere More Familiar explores the rendering of domestic memory inside a pair of vacant houses. In a model home for an up-and-coming planned community, household décor is meticulously staged to evoke a generic suburban domesticity; bookshelves displaying framed stock photos trigger overlapping feelings of nostalgia and desire. Invited to fill in the fiction with scenes from their own past or project onto it their visions of an ideal future, potential buyers engage in a unique kind of voyeurism: an immersive tour of a life that could be theirs.
Hundreds of miles away, a duplex in a small vacation town was inhabited first by a family of five and then by a group of twenty-somethings who hastily abandoned it at the end of the summer. A stark counterpoint to the imagined narrative proposed in the model home, this house lays bare a real and specific history marked by household artifacts and names on the wall. Here, these are not aspirational stand-ins for a hypothetical future; instead, they undeniably signify the past.
The images forge a dialogue between a private space and a public one, revealing sometimes uncanny similarities in the familiar iconography of home. The series also considers photography’s role in recording or constructing, preserving or observing—photographs giving us either something to remember or something to aspire to.