Patrick Ostrowsky
Various Others 2023
A Home has been mostly on the road in the past two years. I found myself sitting in trains, sitting in cars. Traveling between two places and living in two worlds. I lost objects and feelings. I gathered new insights. A Home is a semi-fictional model.
When I moved to another country, I gave up on one thing in exchange for another. Starting from scratch. New beginnings without old endings. No hard feelings. I felt drawn to places that gave me comfort. Mountains, lakes. Silent sites. Buildings with dimmed lights and burning candles. Windows with opaque glasses and filled up with a foggy atmosphere.
A Home is a memory, a blurred memory. On display in the gallery,
there’s a metal structure that occupies the centre of the space. It’s an installation made of modular components. Each component has the same external dimensions. They are all crafted individually with industrial materials and relating to different parts of architecture. The structure needed to be large enough for a person, so it’s 210 cm high and 86 cm wide – which are standard measures of doors. The work has been constructed with two half open doors, and it contains some smaller objects.
Behind the installation there’s a big table and above it a window. A skylight that has been cut into the wall to allow natural light to fall back into the space. The window opens just a gap. Vis-à-vis there’s another window. It has lost most of its transparency and opens to the moment when the night falls.
To the right of the installation a small cabinet stands next to a framed watercolour painting. It depicts a cloudy day over Monte Verità in Ascona from last summer. The wooden object is DIY and functions as a carrier for abandoned clay objects. They inhabit the furniture and make it their home.
On the left side there’s a grid made of clay. It’s glazed and an unlocked lock dangles on its upper part. Normally these grids are found at buildings in front of windows to protect what’s behind from exterior invasion. But sometimes they take off their original function to become agents that tell a story. A Home describes the process of telling a story with the means of sculpture and industrial materials. A sequence of wrong turns, false starts, and personal experiences, as an endless attempt of processing. A Home is that too.
Patrick Ostrowsky, September 2023
