Going Nowhere in Either Direction
going nowhere in either direction is an exhibition featuring the recent work of Ezri Horne and Indigo Conat-Naar. Both artists explore their senses of self in connection to places where they no longer live. Using a wide range of materials, including found furniture, hair, marble, neoprene and sand, the works look through distance and time to reexamine the meanings of home and heritage. going nowhere in either direction addresses the yawning gap between the artist’s origins and their present, one filled with different sorts of dirt, impossible bridges, and two-headed horses.
Conat-Naar merges distinct objects into singular impossible bodies, echoing the distance between herself and her mother. Each sculpture consists of two asymmetrical elements, separated by material, age, or distance. The inherent tensions within these combined forms emphasize a strained connection that spans all forms of being. Accompanying her sculptural works is exodus, which Conat-Naar filmed while helping her mother navigate a forced move out of St. Petersburg, Florida, where Conat-Naar was raised. It is a travelog, documentary, and philosophical portrait of the celebration and grief that grows from the tender relationship between a mother and her daughter, a place, and their memories.
Horne combines motifs of the American Southwest with home improvement construction materials, clay, and wood to untangle their memories of childhood from the geopolitical processes that shaped it. This includes looking backwards at their lineage of ranchers, land surveyors, and construction workers in New Mexico — actors in the endeavor to own and ‘develop’ the land. By replicating scenes and objects from home with layman’s materials, Horne underlines the fallacies of this idealized landscape and the capitalist pursuit of constant, so-called improvement.
Featured alongside Horne and Conat-Naar’s independent work is a collaborative piece they started during their joint residency at Installation Space in 2024. Taking turns, each would describe the layout of their childhood home as the other attempted to draw it. Afterward, they made transparencies of the drawings and used them to create cyanotype blueprints. As a parallel process, they recorded each other’s words and then transcribed the audio in cyanotype ink, using an engineer’s lettering kit and a rapidograph pen. Building upon the themes already present in their own practices, you draw my house, I’ll draw yours plays out the effort and care required to remember a place, inviting failures of memory and language to alter it along the way.
Ezri Horne’s practice spans ceramics, woodworking, printmaking, and browsing the aisles of home improvement stores. Using unexpected materials and laborious craft processes they insert moments of tenderness and humor into otherwise stoic and commonplace forms. Horne, originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, graduated from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2022 with a BA in Anthropology and a BFA in Studio Art. Their work has recently been included in shows at Gallery 263, Installation Space, and Commonwealth Clayworks. They currently live and work in the Boston area.
Indigo Conat-Naar is an interdisciplinary artist whose work highlights the fleeting intersections of being, memory, and place that arise from encountering objects in the world. She grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida and graduated from Tufts University in 2021 with a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Philosophy. Recently, her work has been shown at the Boston Sculptors Gallery Launchpad, Installation Space, and Merrimack College’s McCoy Gallery. She will begin her MFA in Sculpture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall.
