GRANDMA'S HOUSE
Living Room Installation, entire contents of original room reinterpreted
From September 2013 to August 2014, I lived and performed my life inside a re-installation of my grandmother's New Jersey home in Pittsburgh PA.
I emptied her house as our family prepared to move her into a nursing home, and I brought several U-haul trucks filled with all her belongings to an empty house in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
I had few personal belongings other than the inherited contents of my grandmother. She had begun to develop signs of alzheimer's and was unfortunately forced to live in a small room in a nursing home.
I gave semi-weekly tea parties where I gave performances based on home movies. Each was unique and spontaneous for the guests.
Each evening I had the choice to sleep in my grandmothers bed or a bedroom filled with my childhood belongings.
The project was an experiment in how media and memory are intertwined, how life is re-mediated by the methods we use to capture it, and how we are formed as a result of our environment, objects, belonging and family.
I took several thousand digital photographs over and over again, daily, of the rooms and objects.
I created an associative 3D space out of these several thousand photographs, and mapped it out in 3D to resemble the orientation of the original architecture.
Using video processing software, I was able to extract a motion path that followed the handheld camera movements of my grandmothers old home videos, as she followed me as a child giving a tour of the house.
Placing this motion data on a virtual camera, the footage above was produced, a digital home video combining my grandmothers perspective with the modern incarnation of the space.
Dining Room Installation, entire contents of original room reinterpreted
Grandmother's bedroom installation, entire contents of original room reinterpreted
Kitchen Installation, entire contents of original room reinterpreted
Children's room, (both mine on weekend and my mother's old room), entire contents of original room reinterpreted