Elia Bloch

“Pretending to be home”

"A home is something you carry with you all your life..." Do-ho Suh In my work on my home, and yet – not my home, I specifically started by wandering through the streets. The street summoned to me "abandoned orphans" – old furniture thrown away and discarded. Selecting the furniture and items I work with was decided through contemplation of the home I grew up in, and perhaps the home I wish to have, and the difference between the two. Each object or piece of furniture invites me to perform a different action upon it, an action involving glass. Each action has a story. Sometimes, the glass is present - absent and it functions to emphasize what is missing with its transparency. Sometimes, it expresses a great excess that overflows. In some moments it is subtle and almost invisible, and at other moments it is grotesque, perhaps even threatening. Sometimes it has an amusing look, sometimes it wants to decorate and adorn, and in other moments it consumes and burns. The work aspires to exist in a place between reality and fantasy, between the existing object and the image printed in ink on paper. In the video works, I bring hot glass into the domestic sphere, where it suddenly burns and erases images. I aim to confuse the viewer who momentarily questions whether indeed a valuable collectible item is being burned. Slowly, it becomes apparent that what is being burned is a printed image and not the object itself. The act is an act of violence towards the object, but it's actually only an image. Is it true? This is a home attacking itself, both my home and 'not-my' home together. Banal in daily life, almost normal, yet also grotesque, threatening, and at times aesthetic and full of humor. Glass is both the material and the tool with which I work. But it's not just a material; it's also an action.