about House of Ghosts
House of Ghosts is in the collection of Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla, CA.
House of Ghosts, 2024
Art and Design: Eliana Pérez. Poem: Marshall Weber
13 1/2 " x 17 1/16 x 7/8". Accordion bound book. 26 pages. Can be extended up to 28’ long for display. Archival giclée pigment print with pin-hole drawings on Canson 210 gsm 100% cotton rag.
In House of Ghosts, Eliana Pérez bridges her traditional technique and media with digital intervention and suggests that below the illusory safety and comfort of our domestic lives lies stress and fear fed by the real violence and brutality of the world.
Architectural elements appear throughout the book as the narrator moves from room to room and house to house struggling with the unsettling realization that he no longer fits in the places he once felt most at home.
The concrete-gray cover, ostensibly to protect the book and its contents, is left raw and open around the edges, showing that even the most durable facades have vulnerabilities; all of our best defenses have limitations.
At first glance, the painted interiors are comfortable and even luxurious, but a closer look reveals an unsettling undercurrent of violence. Pérez, influenced by Asian miniatures, speckles the depicted rooms with tension between predator and prey: situations where death is imminent, or implicit in the macabre fetishization of slaughtered animal parts as decor.
With pin-prick drawings of clothes-moths textured into the book’s pages, Pérez layers in another level of predation. In her native country of Colombia, a moth in the house can be a harbinger of an imminent death in the family. Hiding on most spreads, these tiny moths threaten the fabrics that host even the most formidable of these beasts, demonstrating that size and ferocity do not correlate with destructive power. Insertion of the insects into the page with needled holes suggests the damage they are likely to inflict, maybe even to the natural fiber pages of the book itself. When extended for display, light passes through the pin-holes and the hidden insects are suddenly revealed from front or back.
House of Ghosts Poem
House of Ghosts
Poem by Marshall Weber
Have I become a ghost in my father’s house?
always returning
trying to make something
out of nothing
has made me less
of a material thing
Every attempt
to make air
water
to make water
earth
to make earth
stone
leaves only a pale fire
that neither illuminates nor burns
§
Have I become a ghost in my mother’s house?
Temple of my creator
where I haven’t a prayer
Will I
will you
to will me
to be more than a ghost
More than a child
§
Have I become a ghost in my own home?
My wife and child
catching insubstantial glimpses
fleeting premonitions
of my presence
Do I leave furtive smells like memories?
§
Have I become a ghost in myself?
Wandering the desert infinity
of an abstract mind
where all perceptions lie
amongst the distant
retreating horizons
§
Now
I am walking back
emerging closer and closer
to the surface of my skin
bandaging time
around my closeted bones
Filling my own body
with my own self
the ghost will join the flesh
and I will cover my family
with the folds of my skin