Home Coming

HOMECOMING.
Is it a return to a place known as home?
Is it a visit, brief or long?
Or is it a concept, perception, or person(s) now gone?

I think the point of home is an intersection where my experience thrives, where I have met people whose lives continue as a part of mine; and mine as a part of who they are. I have found home is not so much where you are “at”, but rather it’s with whom you are bonded. Good “home” company keeps coming back again into each others’ lives no matter how little or great the time lapsed between. Homecoming is a state of nourishment that sustains us so that we flourish.

Throughout my career as an artist and educator in academia, I have taken tens of thousands of photographs of family, friends, associates, and unknowns which I archive. Given this rich resource and the ripening spirit of retirement, I feel compelled to unveil parts of a journey in life through creative play with images of “home” and folks I have photographed. I have chosen photo montage as a medium together with collage and other mixed media to address a theme of Homecoming. People comprise a montage of effects and affectations in life for each of us. I hope my re-contextualized compositions will engage viewers into the valuable moments in a life’s journey. I hope they will rethink, reconsider, and re-appraise their own Homecoming experience.

Statement by Raymond Dalton