Ankita Mukherji remembers home in exhibition ‘Memorabilia’

A visit to Roski School of Art and Design student Ankita Mukherji’s new exhibit in the Helen Lindhurst Gallery feels like a trip home.

Most homes aren’t composed solely of sculptures; nor are they hazy in their outlines and sparse in organization. And it’s unlikely that one would see a giant piece of sculpted pie on an oblique black table, or a window painted with fake scenery, when looking at a picture of home.

But that’s to say nothing of the homes that exist in our minds. Try imagining home. Suddenly, once-clear memories may seem fuzzy. Is that chair in the living room more blue or more teal? And how tall is the coffee table exactly?

Often, what we remember about home is not the real thing, but the diminished memory of it.  

Mukherji’s exhibit, dubbed “Memorabilia,” instinctively reflects this. A fine arts student in Roski, Mukherji described her latest work as “an exploration of the concept of home, and how it is constructed through the images and objects we see around us on a daily basis.”

“My constructed domestic spaces are drawn from my own memories of places I have lived in, or from images of home that I have consumed growing up, and I hope for viewers to be able to project their own memories and experiences on them,” she wrote in an email to the Daily Trojan.

Mukherji, who was born in India, raised in Singapore and now in Los Angeles for college, said that her upbringing contextualizes why she became interested with the idea of home.

“This show is a manifestation of my struggle and subsequent coming to terms with the constructed nature of home, and the false sense of permanence it implies,” Mukherji wrote.

The resulting sculptures from Mukherji’s musings are simultaneously detailed, yet vague as memory itself.

At first glance, some of the sculptures appear rudimentary — not in their implementation, but in their basic outlines.

With closer examination, more refined images of home emerge.  These images encourage the audience to wonder where this home Mukherji has constructed might be and whom it might belong to.

A quote at the entrance to the gallery reads: “Together we generate meaning into the world even as it unfolds before us. Thought is a stream of signs and symbols, strung together, perpetuating and defining our existence. Interpretation depends on the interpreting subject as the sign depends on the object.”

It is the details within the outlines of Mukherji’s sculptures that can remind even the most casual viewer that this memory of home may have once belonged to someone else.   

“Memorabilia” runs Monday through Friday from Oct. 29 to Nov. 8, with a reception on Nov. 1 at 5 p.m.

Visitors may be tempted to sign something familiar to many home gatherings — the guestbook at the front.