Welcome Home: A Virtual Exhibition in a 3D digital space

Background

20-21 Visual Arts Centre commissioned artist Sam Metz to work with young people to create a virtual gallery space. In a virtual gallery takeover, 16-25 year olds were invited to submit and curate images of visual artwork responding to the theme ‘sense of place’ for display in a 3d digital space which they would create. We wanted to know how young people felt about rootedness and being connected to your home (and how that had maybe changed over the past few months).

The Exhibition

Young artists and curators between the age of 16-25 created and curated the artworks in the exhibition with support from the 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Sam Metz and Barbara Grabher. The works explore their sense of place, and in particular what the word ‘home’ means to them. A home can be a domestic dwelling, an individual place of comfort, surrounded by family but also a bigger physical entity – a town, a country across borders and seas or our collective home: planet Earth. Home can also be an abstract space, a location in our mind.

During the Covid-19 pandemic people around the world were instructed to stay at home and everyone’s lives changed. Our relationship to our home altered, even though our homes may not have physically changed. The place of solace and familiarity became one of confinement and we yearned for the unattainable outside world, all the while knowing we were helping to stop the spread of the virus. As life returns to a version of normality, as education, social gatherings and workplaces reopen, we should ask ourselves will our homes return to normal too?