Straight There and Back

Jodi Lightner

Jodi Lightner:

Straight There and Back

Past Exhibition

The themes in the work exist beyond architecture, our attic storage space, and the nooks and crannies we fill. It suggests that our ability to adapt and reconfigure the elements around us could be beneficial. Taking a closer look at our preconceived expectations may actually result in shifting the foreshadowing of our climate, extinctions of species, political culture, and communities. To make a giant jump in these futures, perhaps the patterns and structures we find familiar need to drastically adapt. These constantly shifting relationships should write new stories for the structures we build and the things we carry into them.

Artist Statement

My work explores the relationship between our environment and ourselves as being both physical and perceived. I consider that a place must coexist with what we are thinking, imagining and sensing. As we experience structure through our lens of knowledge and understanding we perceive what is not present. Looking beyond the physical or obvious, I find that architecture and structure provides a sense of order we submissively adhere to. We live in and around these structures, move up and down stairs, and walk around walls. We also skirt around the outside of buildings and climb over fences. The order these fabrications provide is the foundation for our experiences within them.

I see my work as journal entries depicting the metaphors of relationship through the use of structures, architecture, and space. Perceived correlations between these environments and life’s moments indicates that they are fully integrated into our movements and experiences. My interaction within a space can connect directly to human relationship and its tenuous state. It can also depict the temporal and changing physical elements around us. Using structural elements to discuss the break down or build up of the ongoing relational patterns and connections I find between others, the environments where we place ourselves, and the living objects around us, provides me with a language that gives meaning to the human fabricated world around me.

Unraveling how we identify with these personal places is integral to my work. I seek out situations where structure is subverted and the idea of place becomes challenged by our own perceptions, ideas or desires altering the architecture from a static backdrop or prop for our life. Utilizing this response to structure, I am uncovering the discrete variations of our relationship to place and to each other.