Hashimoto Contemporary is happy to current Home & Ghosts, the debut solo exhibition of Angela Fang Zirbes. Set inside the backdrop of an outdated rural home, ghosts and their haunted objects seem inside rigorously embellished striped and wooden paneled interiors. Executed in a monochromatic palette, the work are harking back to an outdated getting old {photograph}, like calling upon a protracted forgotten reminiscence. Impressed by frequent decor usually discovered inside outdated nation properties, fake wood frames encase relics and imagined recollections of a life as soon as lived, serving as recollections of the ghosts previous ‘in life’. These home depictions illustrate the restrictions of life by the usage of conventional compositions, smaller scale imagery, and inflexible posture.
Against this, the second group of works depict ghosts and their haunted objects showing inside uncanny interiors with uncommon cropping and outsized topics. Right here the figures seem weightless and tender, untethered to the restrictions of a life as soon as lived. Isolation serves because the ghostly determine’s final freedom. Freed from societal expectations, they don’t acknowledge the viewer, uninterested as they now not abide by the principles of the residing – as a substitute ruminating on previous recollections and occasions. The work function a illustration of how the apparitions really feel bigger in dying than within the life they lived when ‘in body’. Whereas free, the ghosts are finally confined to what they knew and skilled of their earlier life, trapped contained in the very home they hang-out.
This physique of labor displays the isolating expertise of navigating an identification rooted in liminality as a biracial individual — caught between realities, each actual and imagined. The ghosts in these works echo this in-between state, neither absolutely belonging to the world they hang-out or the one they left behind. These work discover the strain between belonging and estrangement, presenting a haunted panorama that’s each private and political, reckoning with the myths of American identification and the unsure realities that lurk beneath.
