Gilded frames, a mustard yellow chair, the glow of a range hood light in the evening, the shine of golden blonde hair, and a nest of Palo Verde flowers. The spattering of yellow carries you through the fragmented images of the main gallery space as you explore the two-person exhibition, Finding Home. 

Of Sound Mind, Alison Auditore’s now-closing exhibition, is a visual testimony about music’s profound impact on the artist – to the synesthete’s delight. Her work gives shape to booming rhythms and flights of melody, intimately sharing what happens within herself when the music takes her.

Finding Home as a theme is immediately complicated by the wall frame structure you are confronted with when you enter the gallery. You can look around and see photographs of moments captured, vintage photos of more distant memories–a general sense of nostalgia. Taken independently, you would think of finding home as an excavation, a rediscovery. But the wall frame invokes construction. Making home vs. finding it.

When Lali Khalid tossed her dupatta into the air for a shoot, she was approached by Americans who commented on her work, thinking that she was making images in rebellion against what they believed to be her oppression as a Muslim woman. But she was also fighting against “the oppressed version of me that exists in her head.”

Young may be surprised to see me latch onto the religious definition of sanctuary instead of the more common, colloquial sense of the “safe haven” they include in their statement. But any good personal sanctuary is, at the root of it, religious in the broadest sense, where one can commune with oneself and those they love. The home–the hearth–is a place of worship.

I’m new to art criticism. I’ve written various forms of creative nonfiction and prose poetry in the past, and so I rely on these methods when writing art criticism. And while my style has changed marginally, the ethos remains the same–it’s the ethos of annotation.