Curated by Nico Wheadon

Model Home presents the interdisciplinary work of eight artists from the tART collective, a New York-based network of women committed to exploring the intersections of public engagement, education and activism through visual art. In Model Home, Suzanne Broughel, Anna Lise Jensen, Elaine Kaufmann, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, Sandra Mack-Valencia, Carrie Rubinstein, Asya Reznikov and Yasmin Spiro foreground a heightened awareness of the role of objects in discussing cultural value, fetishization and identity. Through a broad survey of the domestic signifiers which simultaneously enable and oppress—mops, feather dusters, ovens, rubber gloves, kitchenware, and things-to-do-lists—this exhibition critiques the notion that there is a “model home” or “archetypal lifestyle” to which universal value can be ascribed and questions the governing political, lingual and cultural forces that write this Utopian yet heavily gendered vision into being. Model Home resituates household objects and actions outside of the diverse spaces we call home and within an exhibitory context to assert that meaning is derived from the intersection of origin and context. As global citizens, these eight artists highlight travel, tourism and routes of migration as major influences on the cultural vale of everyday objects and discuss individual agency—through what could be described as a Fluxist, visual rhetoric—as it relates to desire, self and otherness.