Exhibit propsal - DANA SHAVIN ARTIST

DANA SHAVIN ARTIST

EXHIBITION PROPOSAL
Drawn to Scale: House as Body, House as Unrequited Love
I’m proposing a show of twelve original wood sculptures. Each is a loose representation, or interpretation, of a house I have either lived in, fantasized about living in, or dreamed about repeatedly. The sizes range from 5.75x15 x 8 inches to 26 x 23.75 x10.25 inches. In addition to the sculptures, there will be a 4x6 inch printed booklet, which viewers can take away with them, containing photographs of each house sculpture juxtaposed with the actual house that inspired it, and a short narrative about each. (See below.)
In her book, House as a Mirror of Self, Clare Cooper Marcus writes that, in the process of building his home on Lake Zurich, the psychologist Carl Jung said he wanted “to put the knowledge of the contents of his unconscious into solid form”—i.e., to build a house that would be a representation of his own mind. Over twelve years, as Jung’s self-awareness deepened, the house grew from a primitive one-story dwelling, almost like a hut, to a four-part, multistory home with a courtyard and terrace. Twenty years after “finishing” the house, he finished it again, adding a central tower. This, he explained, was “an extension of self-consciousness achieved in old age,” a part of the house Jung could not have built earlier, because it represented a facet of his consciousness he had to first grow into.
Through my graduate training as a therapist, and later as a psychological examiner administering interpretive personality assessments such as the House-Tree-Person Test (a test in which an individual’s drawings of a house, tree and person are thought to reveal information about their emotional and social functioning), I came to understand Jung’s “house as consciousness” more clearly, and became convinced that the spaces we occupy, and the ways we think and talk about them, reflect who we are, how we feel about ourselves, and how we see ourselves and our world. The spaces we inhabit are the profoundest aspects of our selves, writ large in carpentry.
In my decades-long quest to recover from anorexia nervosa, beginning in my twenties, I was tasked with “rebuilding” my body even as I entertained the ongoing urge to abandon it to starvation. Central to my life during my illness, and later, in the early years of my recovery, were a series of dilapidated rental houses to which I was drawn. At the time, I found them romantic in the way that an unreliable love interest can become, in part because of their very unreliability, a person of intrigue and desire.

Years later, writing at length about my illness and recovery in my book, The Body Tourist (Little Feather Books, 2014) I began to see a connection between the state of my mind/body and the state of the spaces I was drawn to inhabit. Only then did I realize that my affection for these houses had been a kind of identification—I, too, was in disrepair—and that, in loving them, I was attempting to find love for myself. Once I was well and my weight had stabilized, I no longer felt compelled to live in derelict houses. Today, I live in a sturdily built, fully functioning home that sits on five acres in the woods, with floor to ceiling windows that allow for a 360-degree view of the outside. It is a reflection of my now fully functioning body and mind, following my lifelong struggle to find openness and connection to myself and to the outside world.

Viewer Takeaways
Viewers of the exhibit will be invited to think about:
Their own occupied spaces as expressions of their personal physicality and emotional architecture; Their deeply held, possibly unconscious beliefs about where and how they deserve to live, and why; How they present themselves to the outside world (their façade); Spaces they are drawn to or dream of, and what these say about both obvious and hidden, possibly shadow, desires.
Artist Statement
It has been said that when we dream of houses, we are dreaming of our body. I return to the theme of home repeatedly in my writing and my artwork: home as refuge, home as body, home as the dream I can't stop dreaming. Writer/philosopher and art critic John Ruskin wrote, "Home is the place of peace; the shelter not only from all injury but from all terror, doubt and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, it ceases to be home, it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in."

Home, in other words, isn't just where the heart is; it is the heart itself, the private, pulsating soul of the human animal. What we choose to live in, how we live inside it, whether we love or hate or are indifferent to it, is a clue to our relationship with our self.
I work almost exclusively with salvaged materials: wood, tin, wire mesh, string, fabric, roofing shingle, and paint. Some of my house structures appear vacant and forgotten. Others appear crude, damaged, ill-conceived, or unstable. These “flaws” in my sculptures depict the state of my body and mind at the time I was living in and/or dreaming about them. Too, the process by which I build the structures—always halting, often frustrating, and frequently requiring minor to major tear-downs and rebuilds in order to suit my vision, as well as the very concept of “salvage” itself—is a mirror of my process, or journey, from mental illness to recovery.