Curated by Melissa Levin & Mike Quinn

Cuchifritos is pleased to present Close to Home, featuring artists, Josephine Halvorson and Andy Rosen. Being close to home is a physical place, a state of mind, and a psychological space. You can be close to home and things can hit close to home. The works in this exhibition bring the viewer into that place/state/space, closing the gap between that which is present or remembered, and that which is fantasy or fiction. Halvorson and Rosen are conveyers of memory, both capturing real feeling, real home, real time. They make stand-ins, not documents that realize the concept that home exists in your head or wherever you go.

Born in Massachusetts, Josephine Halvorson makes paintings of strange and seemingly small moments. Her paintings are reminders that these moments deserve and warrant consideration and care. At once stark and cozy, abstract and representational, Halvorson’s paintings reform the viewer’s perception of things. She creates mysterious and intimate spaces through her distinctive rendering and composition of burning logs, boarded up windows, snowy landscapes and scattered crumbs.

Maine native Andy Rosen’s sculptures are ‘grown’ from memories of the northern New England environment where he was raised and currently lives and works. He attempts to bring the viewer to a place that doesn’t exist while reminding them of one that does. His sculptures are carved out of wood and assembled into objects and landscapes pulled directly from the unconscious – a house on tall stilts rises out of a whale or a mountain rises out of a boat.