Mandy Bernard

DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE OF THE UNCANNY

two corresponding exhibits | two separate countries | two different years

STATEMENT

Over the past two years, I have grown increasingly fatigued from ongoing adaptation to our new reality. At some point, I recognized a strange dissonance occurring within myself: one of exponential dread tempered with abject numbness. Curiously, this combination seemed to create an unexpected corollary of altered perception. Commonplace objects within my home—which had become a place of both refuge and suffocating confinement—seemed to acquire new, at times sinister, characteristics. I found myself reassessing my surrounding personal possessions and furnishings, and determined them to be wholly familiar yet distinctly uncanny.

This interior discord reflected what was happening outside of my four walls, as well as what was beginning to happen within my frame of mind. Over the past 2+ years much of society has reevaluated its standards of living, the things that are most important to us. It’s as if we’ve all had a collective moment of, in the words of David Byrne, “This is not my beautiful house.”

The aftereffects of this experience will undoubtedly unravel for years to come. These installations and exhibits of soft sculptures serve as textile-based examinations of my own personal processing and regeneration within this period, with a focus on shifts that have taken place inside the home.

2022 Domestic Architecture of the Uncanny at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, Alaska was the doppelgänger exhibit to the one created on residency in Sweden the prior year. The Alaskan counterpart paralleled a focus on processing, regeneration, and shifts that took place within the home from 2020 - 2022. The fiber installation hovered alongside new soft sculptures, as well as those created in Sweden. The new sculptures utilized materials obtained in Sweden.

*Detailed photos of sculptures in Textile | Sculpt section.

2021 Domestic Architecture of the Uncanny exhibit at Konstmuseet i Skövde. Featuring projected video Measured Process, collection of textile sculptures, wool installation created in collaboration with Berith Stennabb, and remnants of wool and linen fiber that was used within all of the exhibited work.