A Room is an Archive of Touch

Grace Atkinson

Jennefer Hoffmann

Natalie Weinberger

"What is it to furnish? To supply with the moveable parts of necessity and delight. In a way, furnishing fulfills us by offering frames for our mortality. It describes our attitude towards time. Patiently it receives and inflects our passage."

—Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, 2011.

A Room is an Archive of Touch is an intimate and personal exploration into complex and fraught representations of both memory and domesticity. Inspired by the poet and essayist Lisa Robertson's work Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, particularly the essay "Atget's Interiors", in which the author remarks, "a room situates a cadence of habit", this exhibition demonstrates the way in such cadence can construct an archive as a testament and record of the past through gestures and intuition. Her notion of the passivity of interior spaces is thought-provoking – the way in which rooms and objects receive us, hold us and challenge us. Historical furniture and objects exhibit their own pasts of ritualistic patterns and everyday ceremonial use, and Grace Atkinson, Jennefer Hoffman and Natalie Weinberger interpret and express this notion through their own unique and proprietary expressions of the often painful, yet beautiful and joyful, acts of "remembering".