Starter Home is a site-specific multi-media installation conceived by artist Christine Altman.

Starter Home takes place in an old home near the center of Torrington, in Northwest Connecticut.  The audience experiences this installation while walking through a real estate tour of the property. During the tour, audiences witness video projected onto the material objects of the home. Local real estate professionals perform as themselves in the tour, and the audience tours the house amidst the artwork installations.

Starter Home is an experiential exhibition of sculpture and multi-dimensional artwork that investigates the environmental psychology of suburban domestic spaces and its collision with the social and gendered pressures of popular culture. The physical objects of the space create a narrative that the audience is confronted by. Video and sound elements installed throughout the house are used to reframe gender and power relations referencing a typical domestic space. 

Starter Home invites the viewer to consider how a typical home and the domestic relationships performed within its context are social tools that influence acceptable gender behavior patterns and values to expose how current representational systems such as television, film and advertising, produce and promote the social mythologies that are performed daily on this personal stage. The viewer is challenged to make comparisons between cultural ideology, economic reality, family relationships and the meaning of home.

Christine Altman is an artist living and working in Connecticut.  Her work takes the form of single-channel video and installation, sculpture, and site-specific art projects.  Her work has been exhibited in a range of venues including museums, galleries and film festivals nationally. Starter Home is Ms. Altman’s first large-scale installation encompassing a single-family house. The context of the venue contributes to and is part of the work’s content. Her work is concerned with environmental psychology and capturing odd moments throughout life when one is most acutely aware of social constructions and puzzled by rituals which suddenly seems absurd. In blurring the lines between art and life, she reframes conventions that are socially enforced upon individuals. She received her BFA from Tufts University and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  Ms. Altman is a 2004 recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from The Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.

For information please contact Christine Altman at 860-324-6926

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