RUBEN BURGESS HOMEBOUND​​ 18 JANUARY – 28 FEBRUARY “Home” rattles itself around the contemporary mind like a ghost of childhood’s past. To those with a distinct affinity for wooden “Live, Laugh, Love” wall hangings and guzzling down chardonnay by the jugload, it is “Where the heart is,” a nicely packaged socio-spatial construct where intimacy and nostalgia blend to bring about illusions of comfort. To others, it is a site of great disappointment, of delineated otherness, a psychical phenomenon barricaded by memories of slammed doors, broken glass, and popping forehead veins, where lines are irreparably drawn in the sand. The house, those who have nurtured or failed us, a blanky or stuffed animal we fondled the day we were born– objects must traverse the murked-up expanses of meaning, memory, and imagination to (de)materialize into the abstract entity of “Home,” a network of diverse, ever-changing mental projections as touching as they are binding. “Home,” over time, drifts away from a passive, given state towards an unactualizable yearning for “what once was,” “what could have been,” and “what could be.” A desire for familiarity, for comfort, for a purely nurturing warmth tethers itself to the past as it stretches into the present, hooking onto habit, consistency, and the compulsion to repeat as it informs the assumption and alteration of newfound shelters, sometimes fleeting, sometimes resilient. Identity, environment, the objects we own and the things we wear submerge themselves into the system of images such that they metastasize into second skins, those psycho-physical entities which swaddle, encase, and envelop us, promising to temporarily make us feel a “Home” within our bodies and beings, though often crumbling into accelerationist obsolescence. Those moments or eras, however, where a seemingly stabilized sense of "Home” reintroduces itself, nurtures our ability to lay roots within ourselves, to soften the armor of selfhood, to open ourselves up to a more gentle, tender interior, to rewrite “Home” on our own terms. Ruben Burgess’s “Homebound” choreographs gestural and material investigations of the modes with which this multi-layered concept of “Home” weaves itself into the human experience. The second skin takes center stage as a tension between the aggressive and fragile, forceful and brittle, sterile and warm, fills the space with an energy that feels as ethereal as it is unsettling. Asbestos-adjacent popcorn ceiling restricts an otherwise fluid membrane as it reaches out and latches itself to its exterior, straddling the processes of being split apart and opening up as the walls become engorged with a strained relationship between restraint and freedom. A diorama of the mind erupts around a functionless chair-like assemblage that feels fixed in a state of buckling, its hunting arrow legs quivering under the weight of their responsibility to support. Assisted readymades stretch themselves across metal skeletal structures, each bearing the marks of a moment, process, and history. In one, a bizarre found object, a piece of near-ripping nylon stretched to its extreme across a metal structure, becomes the site of a one-shot, one-wrong-move-and-it’s-ruined cuntification procedure where Burgess coated this body in layers of black exterior paint, surgically sliced each flank with a razor blade, and gently snatched its waist with a leather belt until it became swaddled in a particular genre of executive realness which hangs on by a thread. In the other, stained white tank tops carry a historical presence of origin and aftermath, with a massive hole burnt in their sternums igniting simultaneous images of belligerence, vulnerability, volatility, and emptiness. Encountering Burgess’s work opens a fragile gateway into our uniquely complicated relationships to “Home.” Singed, sinched, skinned, and stretched, the walls of images we have constructed to shelter our beings lie fixed in a state of renovation, manipulated into a delicate equilibrium which, any day, will rust, rip, or collapse into the next cycle of demolition and remodeling. Burgess’s “Homebound” invites us to confront the frailty and tension of “Home”’s psychical structures, offering a visceral reflection on the constant, uneasy balancing act between what we long for and what we can never quite reclaim.