Mixed media installation of the text, Take Me Oh Home, written and designed by Wilber, printed on four panels of clear mylar (18×44 inches) and installed in the four built-in wooden bookcase glass windowpanes of a the gallery, Trackhouse, in Oak Park, Illinois. The text accompanies this document. The 3:30-minute video by Wilber, Backwash, is installed on a laptop computer in the bookcase and is also available to be viewed as a projection across the bookcase and room which includes other installed artworks (such as Joan Livingstone’s white felt, Migrations.) The gallery is on the first floor of a private home (open to the public) as part of the group exhibition, Turning Home, presented in April 2004. The text postures and plays with stilted erotic intimacy and indeed raises questions regarding the possibilities of intimacy in a home, particularly set in the context of the comfortableness of a beautiful wooden bookcase in a secure and sumptuous suburban home. The text design is treated in a baroque and expressionistic manner, both contemporary and with remnants of the old world fading before our eyes. The knowledge of words provided by the books that are not seen in the empty bookcases hangs heavy and wanting, unfulfilled and waiting. The bookcase doors are ajar and open, so the text is viewed right-reading and “wrong-reading” or backwards, on glass panes, one layered upon another when viewed from different angles. The third exhibition in this Oak Park, Illinois, home interprets the domicile as a place that is inevitably lost but always sought thereafter.

Photos © Dan Rest