All five artists took their blank checks in different directions. The advantage of having a suburban home double as a gallery space is that there’s an existential shorthand viewers are familiar with: a kitchen here, a bedroom there, a bathroom down the hall. But at the same time, its lack of inhabitants made the space feel alienating. Several attendees murmured that the house looked mid-renovation. “It’s like the homeowners gave up part way through,” someone commented, pointing out the new drywalling. That liminal in-between-ness makes for good art installation.

That sense of familiar unfamiliarity is best embodied by Rachael Comer’s “There Wasn’t One Single ‘Pavlov’s Dog,’” located in one of the bedrooms. An exploration of sexual violence and burgeoning sexuality, Comer’s bed installation replicates the germinal moment in a lot of young people’s lives: first discovering porn on the World Wide Web. 

She molded the bedsheets into a human-like form that houses a laptop, as if someone is hiding their queries from the outside world. On the laptop screen, a series of frenzied, horny searches are typed out and compulsively deleted –  “gangbang double penetration,” “tits bj foreplay,” “lesbian first time,” “pov busty teacher seduces student.” They play in a loop, and are real-life searches Comer collected from others. On the ceiling above the installation is a written meditation on sexual assault and pornography, grounding the scene below as both a moment of self-discovery and self-annihilation.

In the adjacent bedroom, Nadia Ahmed took bits and bobs found around the house — oven and door knobs, tiles — and drenched them in beeswax, a way of preserving the memories left behind by the previous homeowners. Next door, Ali E. Meyer’s kaleidoscopic video installation weaving archival family footage and animation lit up the window in the darkened bathroom. And across the way, Gaeun Kim made a hallway of doors in the former kitchen using paper, ceramic knobs, and repurposed doors from around the home.