KRISTA SVALBONAS
Ideas of home and dislocation have always been compelling to me as the child of
parents who arrived in the United States as refugees. Born in Latvia and Lithuania,
parents who arrived in the United States as refugees. Born in Latvia and Lithuania,
my parents spent many years after the end of the Second World War in displaced-
persons camps in Germany before they were allowed to emigrate to the United
persons camps in Germany before they were allowed to emigrate to the United
States. My family’s displacement is part of a long history of uprooted peoples for
whom the idea of “home” is contingent, in flux, without permanent definition and
undermined by political agendas beyond their control. Perhaps as a result, I am
fascinated by the language of spatial relationships and by the impact of architectural
form and structure on the psychology of the human environment.
Photography also plays a key role in this history of displacement: photographs were
among the few possessions my family was able to take with them when they fled the
Russian occupation. Photographs documented a home and a country that most Baltic
refugees, including my parents, thought they would never see again. I was raised on
these visual memories, and the accompanying stories of a “homeland” that remained
distant and inaccessible—until the unimaginable happened in 1991, when the Baltic
states regained their freedom.
Complicated by this family history, my definition of home constantly oscillates
between past and present. Migrator began with photographs I took in the three
locations I have called home in the past eight years: the New York metro area, rural
Pennsylvania, and Chicago. Each image is a visual sketch of the genius loci of the
landscape at a particular moment in my history. Images are printed on dibond and
CNC routed and reassembled in sets of three. I constructed sculptural planes in mdf
at various heights and angles thereby creating hybrid structures that reinterpret and
reinvent architecture, disrupting space, light, and direction. Migrator turns an analytical
gaze on the architecture of my past and present while offering a personal reflection
on the nature of home.
whom the idea of “home” is contingent, in flux, without permanent definition and
undermined by political agendas beyond their control. Perhaps as a result, I am
fascinated by the language of spatial relationships and by the impact of architectural
form and structure on the psychology of the human environment.
Photography also plays a key role in this history of displacement: photographs were
among the few possessions my family was able to take with them when they fled the
Russian occupation. Photographs documented a home and a country that most Baltic
refugees, including my parents, thought they would never see again. I was raised on
these visual memories, and the accompanying stories of a “homeland” that remained
distant and inaccessible—until the unimaginable happened in 1991, when the Baltic
states regained their freedom.
Complicated by this family history, my definition of home constantly oscillates
between past and present. Migrator began with photographs I took in the three
locations I have called home in the past eight years: the New York metro area, rural
Pennsylvania, and Chicago. Each image is a visual sketch of the genius loci of the
landscape at a particular moment in my history. Images are printed on dibond and
CNC routed and reassembled in sets of three. I constructed sculptural planes in mdf
at various heights and angles thereby creating hybrid structures that reinterpret and
reinvent architecture, disrupting space, light, and direction. Migrator turns an analytical
gaze on the architecture of my past and present while offering a personal reflection
on the nature of home.
