BOREALIS: Arrhythmia is the artist’s first temporary public installation. 32 Ryans Hill Road (32RHR) is the contemporary, purpose built studio and artist’s home designed by Barbara Houston which provides the spare proto-minimalist frame for a 200’ painting of the boreal forest. As with all of Houston’s work the visible and the invisible are put into direct play. Stating her preference for materials with a past, elements with irreplaceable presence and with scars and memories that reference a former purpose, Houston envelops the architecturally lauded form with the powerful but ghostly presence of collective pasts and unknown futures.

Every house tells a story. Some tell many. 32RHR tells more than most. The architectural story of the first contemporary house, the progenitor of a vernacular, contextual experiment that is situated on the ideological coastlines of outport traditions in Newfoundland, Canada. Less known are the lifestyle experiments, contentions, dreams, allegiances and displacement born within. The building exists in the conversations around light, space, sex, the boundaries between inside and outside, between Houston seeking new means of manifestation that cling to the massing and fill the silent spaces in between. Within this real and imaginary framework, the work lends its own version of what it is to be human.

Before being bound and pinned onto the architectural form, the material, soft and pliable, archival and eternal, bear the scars of the past and the impress of memory upon them. Her predilection for materials allows her, through the act of sculpting and mark making a vehicle to reshape the narrative as much as the form. Tyvek© HomeWrap and permanent inks become the syntax of a language based on the malleability of material and memory. The results are a work that both imagine the future and materialize the past. The tensions they hold are multiple. Literalizing sustainability, Houston calls upon the secret life of objects/form to reveal themselves through the prolapses of material whose meaning cannot be fully constrained.

Neither entirely figurative nor entirely abstract, BOREALIS: Arrhythmia is a fundamentally reductivist approach to material that is deeply impregnated with the burden of building history. Sometimes this reads as a confrontation between the building and its past and others an accumulated tension that itself becomes a stand in for human identity, vulnerability and desire. Always they occupy a liminal space where form is in a continual state of becoming.

Proximity and aspect constantly change. Like emotions they are fugitive, restless and refuse to settle into singular meanings and forms. Environmental shape shifting in character as much in form, depending on where one stands, what day or time, BOREALIS: Arrhythmia can appear mordant, lyrical and even comic. But underneath the surface impressions is the undertow of building forms, a less palpable but more powerful energy field that foresee us to confront the inherent tensions between the body, the object, the gaze and the architectures that contains them.

Just as all art is manifest thought, BOREALIS: Arrhythmia are extroversions of interior conditions. Houston addresses the tensions between the public and private self. In doing so, she investigates the ways in which the involved but absent body is both an object of desire and a site of personal expression.

Muscular and vulnerable, BOREALIS: Arrhythmia is a registration of memory that calls inevitably to ideas about the fragility of the human form and the malleability of identity. Pulsing between the bodies of expression and reception as if to trace the unsettling arrhythmia of recurring experience.