Balcony, Backyard
Balcony, Backyard is a painting-based sculptural installation focusing on a nuclear family story following the 2008 financial crisis in the United States. Each painting is a semiotic materialization blending the family’s collective memories with objects from their home, highlighting how a plummeting housing market left an indelible mark on the domestic sphere. The installation features oil paintings on canvas, set in ornate wooden picture frames.
To support these visuals there is a short multi-character fiction work of the same title that accompanies the family’s journey through this period. The boundaries recreated by the work reconstruct the complexity of family kinship within the limits of physical space, represented here by the library in which the installation is located.
Artist’s statement
The beginning of my adolescence was marked by bright red “Foreclosure” and “For Sale” signs. Commonly referred to as “The Great Recession”, the financial crisis of 2008 was brought on by an excess of subprime mortgages—loans issued to home buyers who were not able to pay them back. I grew up seeing how the loss of one’s home, the physical container for the family unit, redefined the prolific idea of the all-American family. Balcony, Backyard seeks to process this particular moment in US society.
Bio
Born in 1998, Annalise June Kamegawa is a Japanese-American artist and designer based in Milan, Italy. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science from the University of California, Berkeley and a master’s degree in Product Design from the Fulbright Scholar program at Politecnico di Milano. Through her practice, she explores the narrative form by combining language with non-traditional mediums.
