Home Stage by Alanis Santiago-Rodriguez

from the artist: “Home Stage is about discovery. I am learning how to look within myself and my experiences to see what comes out of it. I am letting my intuition guide me to decide when I need to make a photograph. I create these images of my body performing in these domestic spaces to understand why I usually feel emotions of anxiety and unbelonging in these spaces. This project started off as an exploration of different emotions. My feelings of anxiety within a domestic space juxtaposed with my fantasy of complete freedom. Then it turned into a need to understand why the images I was making felt so confined and performative within these spaces.

Growing up, because my dad is in the military, my family and I had to move about every three years. As a result, “home” always felt temporary. As I worked on this project, I was in the process of helping my parents settle into their new house. In doing this, I found a box of personal family photographs from throughout the years, and while looking at them, I noticed myself paying attention to the different background of the images as opposed to the subjects in the foreground. I was analyzing how each house in which the photographs were taken looked like staged sets.

Some questions my work raises are: Whose body is depicted? What is the significance of depicting different bodies in a domestic setting? Why are the identities of the bodies depicted obscured? This work examines the connection of an obscured body to the domestic setting it is placed in, by pairing images of a body in a domestic setting, alongside images that depict the home as a “set.” Overall, Home Stage strives to translate the feelings of domestic discomfort, and a longing for the fantasy of freedom. By creating this work I try to understand myself better; understand where I am coming from, mostly as an artist, but also as a person. “