The House Protects the Dreamer

Krystal DiFronzo and Kathryn Shriver, 2022

The House Protects the Dreamer explores the intuitive resonances between inherited domestic skillsets, labor, and the home as its own body of inherited trauma. It investigates labor as a time-intensive, meditative and restorative practice that concurrently uses and consumes the body. The home is both a site of labor and a site of shelter; processes of decoration and covering-up are at once restorative and claustrophobic. Methods of making and the value assigned to craft are understood as generational inheritance, where process-based, tacit knowledge is passed down alongside trauma. The body and its practices cannot be severed from its ancestors and the physical spaces they share. This knowledge connects mind, body, and input from the world while presenting the opportunity to either reify the traditions and traumas or actively reroute them.

Krystal DiFronzo turns to the 1970s film Wanda for new considerations of the home. The title character grapples with a sense of aimlessness after leaving her husband and hopping from various domestic spaces of men trying to find a space of comfort and security, all against a Rust Belt backdrop. DiFronzo examines the discomforting notion of home–a tension between commeradie and difference–through their examination of materiality, labor, and storytelling. If Wanda examines the day-to-day and real-life struggles of her main character, then DiFronzo’s labored weavings access a symbolic, transcendent temporality. Their weavings allude to the dream world or the archetypal realm, impossibly inexhaustible of meaning and nuance while examining larger notions surrounding death and birth. Kathryn Shriver uses mass-produced fixtures and handmade facsimiles of hardware associated with commercial home decor to examine the intersections of domesticity, taste, class, and both the intimate moments and little upsets embedded in home life. Along with using the geometry and repetition of beadwork, her practice investigates how a home can absorb a presence through what remains–hardware holes, hooks that once held clothes, indexical mark making of a former resident. Both artists play with the home’s psychological resonances, comforting and discomforting, to examine personal narratives while deepening a tacit knowledge of material.

Krystal DiFronzo (she/they) is an artist and educator based in Ridgewood, Queens. They received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012 and their MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2020. Utilizing natural dye, silk painting, weaving, sculpture, drawing, and video their work seeks out histories surrounding the relationships between pharmakon, ecology, symbiosis, illness, desire, and ritual. They use these histories as a framework to construct slippery narratives that weave together past bodies with personal poetics and contemporary struggles with labor, medicine, and environmental collapse. They have held solo exhibitions at Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh; Hume, Chicago; Ballroom Projects, Chicago; and Dirt Palace in Providence, RI. Their work has been shown in group exhibitions at Western Exhibitions, Chicago; Field Projects, New York; and digitally through The Drawing Center’s Viewing Program and Perrotin Gallery. They have been an artist in residence at The Atlantic Center for the Arts and at Lafayette College’s Experimental Printmaking Institute and at Bunker Projects as part of a craft fellowship. In July 2022, their first NYC solo exhibition will open at Wave Hill in the Bronx, as part of their Sunroom Project Space.

Kathryn Shriver (she/her) is a visual artist from Western New York, now currently living and working in Pittsburgh. Her work spans across painting, sculpture, drawing, and writing, but is grounded in the methods and legacies of the fiber arts with a particular focus on glass beads. Kathryn holds a BA in Studio Arts from Wells College (Aurora, NY) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University (Montreal, QC), and has also received training from the Art Students League in New York and as a copyist in the Louvre, Paris. She has attended residencies with the Vermont Studio Center, MOMUS, and Sager Reeves Gallery (Columbia, MO). Her work has been shown within the United States and Canada, including with Studio Sixty Six (Ottawa, ON), Tempus Projects / CUNSTHAUS (Tampa, FL), Gallery 621 (Tallahassee, FL), and Sager Reeves Gallery and the Vermont Studio Center. Alongside her art practice, Kathryn has an invested interest in arts-based research, and is currently working with the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork research team as an Artist Fellow. This upcoming summer, Kathryn will be working in Victoria, BC at the Bonnie McComb Kreye Studio Residency.