Everyone has distinct memories of their childhood home. Take a moment and think of your childhood home. What do you see, feel, and hear? What do you remember? Was it A place that was comforting, familiar, a space where everyone came together as a family? My memories of my childhood home are the opposite. For me, home was a place of alienation, anxiety, and anger because mine was a broken home. To compensate for the lack of companionship and consistency I invented and lived within an imagined sanctuary, that became my coping mechanism.

My installation, The Red Room is a revisiting of this sanctuary where various elements expressively tell the story the emotional stresses and strains I lived with. This installation should be understood as a surreal dramatization of my inner feelings and not be interpreted as depiction of actual truth. Many of the objects in the room address my feelings of isolation and loneliness. There is the chair, I become the chair because it was a space I took up in the house and it became a comfort zone, and to have the single chair symbolizes my connection with the domestic space and emphasizes on my feelings of abandonment. The television that became my friend, its body becoming a living creature that reflect its influence on my childhood. Other furnishings in my surreal sanctuary allude to my alienation where feelings are suppressed and kept hidden in drawers and jars. The jars where I store negative memories are capped so that they won’t escape but are still visible for the viewer because even when we keep things locked away they are still on the surface where some people can still see them.

The Red Room as a space also says something about my loner existence, the room is not conceived as a place to gather but rather is sized and furnished for one expressing the separation of family life even when living under one roof. By constructing the room to be only 8x10 feet, filled with furniture, the viewer only has so much room to move and only allows very few people inside at a time. A theme found in objects throughout the room is the absence of my father, another reason as to why I looked for attention in the sexual and strange is because I could not find love from the void that once was a parental male figure. This is why he is a scribble instead of a person in the family portrait that hangs on the back wall. This highlights the absence of family and the true emotions that came with it. Its red frame, along with the other shade of red in the room, embodies the facade of a happy family and happy home. To me the color red is emblem of what I consider to be fake, much like the domestic home. Even though the feelings of what this room explores are troubling ones, I see this as a means to healing, a way to come to terms with my past. Yes, it was a time in my life that was painful but it was also the first time that creating became my sanctuary. It was when a lonely child found comfort through the surreal and abstract world through imagination.