Homesickness: An Interview

with Whitney Sage

by Courtney Simchak

 
[slider_pro id=”80″]

 

A home provides us shelter, protection, and an extension of self. In a larger sense, home is not a structure, but the atmosphere and people in which our neighborhoods are composed of. By extension, home may be a partnership or sense of belonging to a city. Where we live informs our way of life and filters the world we see. Whitney Sage’s work explores the complicated relationships we have to this feeling of “home”—the places where we live, where used to live, or where we can never live again.

Sage’s recent work revisits suburban Detroit, where she grew up. As an artist currently working in Columbus, Ohio, these tender drawings depict the nostalgia and loss of being displaced from your home. Sage explores the complicated boundaries of home, body, self, and also strives to challenge the damaging misconceptions about Detroit and other communities by giving voices to people in the community and creating new work together.

In our interview with the artist, Sage shares about her background, her hometown, and how she values community in the process and making of her work.

▱

COURTNEY SIMCHAK: Your work, especially your series “Homesickness,” centers around the loaded concept of home as an idea of nostalgia, psychology, and ecology. Can you talk more about what led you to make this series of drawings? Have you always been interested in the idea of home?

WHITNEY SAGE: My work has always had a relationship to home, specifically through the evocation of my hometown of Detroit. I think physical distance has often influenced the themes central to my work due to out-of-state jobs and schooling that have kept me away from Detroit for most of my adult life. Being constantly at some distance from a beloved city so intertwined with personal identity and memories of growing up has made me unapologetically nostalgic and at the core of all of the conceptual content informing the various series, it’s these nostalgic and homesick impulses which continually bring me back to the space of the home, either through images of homes, the creation domestic installation spaces or fragments, or even the use of my hometown’s landscape as a site-specific installation locale.

While the entire Southeast Michigan community has suffered economically during the current generation, as someone from the suburbs, I can still drive by my childhood home and experience the memory recall that place inspires. It’s heartbreaking to me to know that there are so many individuals who metaphorically, emotionally, and physically can’t ever go home again.

SIMCHAK: There is tenderness in your drawing style, but also an intense gaze—entire homes have been voided out of the scene. It speaks of so much more than just loss from the natural progression of growing up. As urban sprawl and economic factors continue to influence who and why someone is allowed a home, to a keep a home becomes more and more problematic, especially when you consider the drastic changes in Michigan and Detroit specifically.

SAGE: Calling Detroit “home” is a complicated endeavor as it’s distinctly linked with ideas about identity and authenticity. Overall, to consider oneself a Detroiter is to associate oneself with grit, thankless hard work, and perseverance in the face of adversity. Despite these shared characteristics, there are real and perceived differences between those who grow up in Detroit’s city limits and those who grow up in suburban Detroit. The most stunning difference between the suburbs and Detroit city proper is the past decade’s toll on urban neighborhoods and communities. There are some streets that have completely reverted back to prairie and many others with only one or two houses or buildings left standing. While much of SE Michigan has suffered economically in recent years, as someone from the suburbs, I can still drive by my childhood home and experience the memory recall that place inspires. It’s heartbreaking to me to know that there are so many individuals and families from Detroit who metaphorically, emotionally, and physically can’t ever go home again.
 

SIMCHAK: This is even more prevent in your work in “Composition D” series, where you play around with dynamic between perception of a place and a plane’s reality. Can you talk a little bit about the role urban degradation informs and shapes your work? How do you think the popular depictions of places like Detroit damage or misrepresent the residents? Do you think there are direct ramifications that can negatively affect residents due to that misrepresentation?

SAGE: My Detroit-based work has always been pretty reactionary to current events and what influenced many of my earlier works was the national reportage about Detroit published immediately after the auto bailout. The photographs that would often accompany these print and web stories often showcased images of inhumanly large degraded factories, trees growing through incinerated cars, empty schools with furniture and books strewn about, endless sagging and abandoned homes, etc. To me, the images were always far more interesting and voyeuristically appealing than the articles they accompanied, and perhaps despite the article’s intentions, the images always narrated a story line of Detroit as a modern post-apocalyptic ruin.

Knowing the city, its rich history, and the resilience and creativity of the community that remains, these misrepresentations and stereotypes are disheartening as they oversimplify what the city and its people are actually like. These images fail to acknowledge the riches the city still has, and with so many people dedicating their life to making the city better in big and small ways, the perpetuation of these images can be really deflating as they undercut the pride many Detroiters have long felt about our city, our home, and our communities.

Overall, to consider oneself a Detroiter is to associate oneself with grit, thankless hard work, and perseverance in the face of adversity. Despite these shared characteristics, there are real and perceived differences between those who grow up in Detroit’s city limits and those who grow up in suburban Detroit.

SIMCHAK: You have several pieces where you have reached out and worked with local communities, such as your installation “Prayer Flags for Cincinnati.” What has it been like to incorporate your work into a community context? Does it affect the more traditional forms of your artwork?

SAGE: I love community-based projects because of the incorporation of other people’s stories into the work; the narratives and goals of these projects feel more authentic in their expression when other voices are included. The “Prayer Flags” project began in Detroit, and the process for that iteration of the series wasn’t very collaborative in that the themes and narratives featured on the Detroit flags really only included voices of people I already knew and featured a story line I played an active role in narrating.

Due to my outsider status in making the Cincinnati version of the project, I had to rely on the input of the community to not only tell me about the city, it’s history, and beloved and needy sites, but community members even helped to make their own flags that were utilized alongside mine in the project.

“Prayer Flags for Cincinnati” expanded the scope of the series thanks to the incredible communal enthusiasm it received, and the inclusivity of so many voices made the end product more rewarding and meaningful for me as an artist. As a result, I’ve be reconsidering how other current series of mine could be expanded to be more inclusive of more diverse points of view beyond just my own.

I think the most satisfying thing about being an artist is the ability to express feelings and address issues through a physical visual language that is inherently nuanced and fails to contain all of the answers.

SIMCHAK: You work in a variety of mediums. Do you find that you gravitate to one more than another? What are the benefits you find in different mediums?

SAGE: I think my work has always revolved around the practices and traditions of painting since almost every series of work I’ve produced has involved a paintbrush in one way or another. I’ve always enjoyed the act of recreating an image in paint despite the quickness and mechanical accuracy that photography and digital technology provides. Even with perfect execution, there is inherently a subjectivity in the act of painting an image. For me, the recreation of these buildings and sites through the act of painting sentimentalizes them and connects the sites to the nostalgic impulse of memory.

Despite utilizing the painted image, many of my series have expanded beyond the confines of traditional painting into other media including fibers, installation, and sculpture. In fibers, I’ve found a direct linkage between the painted image and associations of home through the medium’s long relationship with the domestic sphere in the form of crafts and home décor. In sculpture and installation, the works are able to be directly placed within the city’s landscape itself or exist within a domestic space. Through existence in the lived sphere, I feel that these works are able to produce a more immersive and direct experience for the audience beyond what my past traditional paintings could offer.
 

SIMCHAK: What is the most satisfying thing about being an artist? The most challenging?

SAGE: I think the most satisfying thing about being an artist is the ability to express feelings and address issues through a physical visual language that is inherently nuanced and fails to contain all of the answers. The making of my work serves as an outlet to express things that are complex and outside of my own control while allowing me to come to terms with the overwhelming anxiety that the feeling of helplessness produces.

Relatedly, I think that the most challenging thing about being an artist is constant fear that your work is meaningless to anyone besides yourself. Self-doubt is always lurking and sometimes the constant questioning and reflection that is so important to growing as an artist can easily backfire and lead us to question the very impulse that drives our own artistic expression.
 

SIMCHAK: What’s on the horizon for you?

SAGE: In the studio I’m continuing work on “Homesickness Series,” specifically expanding the number of the painted images in the series while exploring the relationships between the image of the home as a form of portraiture—aiming to connect the home’s disappearance with reminders that people once occupied it. With so many homes abandoned and lost to degradation, arson, or blight removal efforts, I think the expressive potential of the series exists most poignantly in the enormous scale of losses. As such, it’s important to me that the physical scale of the series overwhelms the viewer, as I see that paralleling the overwhelming emotional burden that residents have experienced in the disappearance of the neighborhoods they grew up in. As the series expands, I’m also thinking about how narrative and storytelling could factor into the work and how voices of those whose homes and communities were lost or forever changed might enrich the impact of the work.

 

Whitney Lea Sage, a native of suburban Detroit, currently lives and works in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has been featured in notable exhibitions at The Painting Center in NYC, Superfront LA, UICA, and the Muskegon Museum of Art.