Page - 212 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

212 | Ailie M. Posillico thought they once were. We can no longer believe the home to be an interior space constituted by four walls meant to keep the communal out. In May 2020, professor of religion and visual culture Dr. Aaron Rosen, and Massachusetts-based artist Billie Mandle, whose work focuses on the poli- tics, histories, and paradoxes of place, came together to launch an exhibition titled Home Alone Together. The exhibition, supported and featured by Image, a journal representing art and literature, ran for twelve consecutive weeks during the summer of 2020, hosted by the journal’s webpage. Collating the work of 25 artists from across the globe, Rosen and Mandle probe the theme of domesticity. Submitting an image each week, either of their living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, gardens, kitchens or of a mixture of the people and things found within these, the contributing artists allow us into spaces that are intimately their own. Through the content of their homes, they provide us with images of the objects and people that constitute themselves. As visitors move through the virtual exhibition space, we can choose to view the photographs in categories sorted by either room, week, or artist. Each image is captioned first with the space in which it was taken (bathroom, kitchen, living room, etc.), and then with a title, the artist’s name, and date. One never gets a sense that one is touring through the artist’s home. Instead, carefully framed images of bodies, books, and blankets flood the frame such that the image seems as though it could have been taken from anywhere, from inside anyone’s home. In week one, photographer and book-maker Clau- dia Hermano, interested in themes of home and belonging, contributes a pho- to, “Bedroom” (12 April 2020), in which we see a cascade of blue. The fitted bedsheet just slept in, unmade from the night before, evokes familiarity as it ripples, wave-like, across the mattress. In week three, Amsterdam-based artist Yvonne Lacet, whose work centers cityscapes, landscapes, and nature play, includes an image, “Kitchen” (26 April 2020), in which plant life develops; a thin and fragile root, much like the one that currently shoots out from the clippings of my own quarantine-era philodendron, spirals out atop vibrant green. And in week five, London-based artist Aude Hérail Jäger, who is inspired by dualities and finding meaning in the immediate environment, provides a silhouetted shadow of a body bathing in sunlight: “Bedroom” (8 May 2020). Through these images, which stage the particularities of everyday life, the air of the online exhibition is filled with a sense of the personal that somehow, miraculously, one may even say “heavenly”, speaks to us universally. Stirring feelings of what is familiar, the artists’ close-up frames provide obscured views of laundry lines, shadow puppets, and bodies splayed across www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 211–215