Home Goods (2022)
Home Goods is a solo exhibition of new works by Rex Delafkaran consisting of mixed media sculpture. A show including but not limited to popcorn ceilings, gold door handles, a Persian carpet and something like ‘that sawhorse from the garage,’ the exhibition is a deliberate combination of readymade and handmade materials that toy with the dichotomies between aesthetic cultural sameness and personal narrative.
The exhibition uses interior trappings of 1990s homes from the artist’s upbringing in Orange County, California and combines them with those of her Iranian home aesthetics from that time. Through that combination Delafkaran finds a desire for the ornate and the excessive in both experiences. In Home Goods hyper specificity is identified in these otherwise ubiquitous interior materials that, when recontextualized and combined, create experiments of hybridity, personal history, and myth building.
The work mythologizes interior design tools with a nod to the store Home Goods, a symbol of formulaic domestic sameness. Home Goods the exhibition sets out to perform aspects of identity with tension between sincerity and apathy, and an emphasis on failure and the absurd.
