Kathy Temin—Home Dis-play

Delicate abjectness and structural discomfort characterise the variously scaled homes and habitats Temin made in the mid-1990s. They are the result of her questioning of the conceptual and formal material resolution of a work of art. The seemingly unfinished, DIY aesthetic and physical state of the works is a deliberate counter to industrial fabrication and perfect geometry.

The works on display are informed by Temin’s research of bird boxes while on residency in New Plymouth, Aotearoa/New Zealand, in 1995. In these works, she tests the problem of ideal habitats, certain aspects and conventions of modernist art and architecture, museological display, and the call of cultural and personal memory.

As an almost human-scale hybrid of bird-box and modernist architectural icon, Temin’s homes are layered with veneers of function and dysfunction, vulnerability, anxiety, enclosure and sanctuary. They reiterate the body’s desire for and inhabitation of seemingly impossible but ideal refuges.