House of Lace

                    House of Lace, (Ochre Pit), Emma Butler Gallery, oil on canvas, 36" x 48", Steven Rhude

For centuries in art, certainly since the renaissance, there has always been depicted for contemplation a house configured in mind and spirit. It may take numerous shapes and forms, but invariably it is not just "a house", but  "the house." However, whose house it is may often be up for debate, and to whom the house belongs is still collectively an issue in the twenty first century. Some consider it a house prepared - a spiritual house, others think of it as a psychological house - one in which we associate our multitude of experiences within a structure of faith and mental latitude, rooms of growth, sex, and change... rooms of sadness and grief... rooms of death and  revelation, rooms of  social exchange and the expression of ideas that attach or eventually dissolve within the walls of our individual or personal memory.

 Houses are at the forefront of our dreams and nightmares. No matter how elaborate they may be - or simple they may appear, we are inseperable from the materiality that constitutes the presence of their psychological make up. They are the grain of a street, a neighborhood, province, and country - even our house of parliament. They are also the stuff of philosophy and film. Why else would the horror film industry predicate and pour much of its time and energy into the genre of the haunted house?

 And yet, the house is also a commodity in its own right, a way to profit as one moves up the detached ladder of status and investment; just a structure of bricks and mortar to be analyzed by the investment industry and the bank of Canada. The "home buyer" - a moniker for what? Perhaps a human reduced to a statistic. A way to ensure that one of the most basic of human needs remains as fragmented as the mind of a house without inhabitants.

However, be that as it may I am an incurable romantic. I see the house bathed in the light of the sun, not the darkness of night that may or may not preoccupy it. Folklore in Newfoundland will bring many to the threshold of this realization as it must if one is to maintain the reality of a house's relevance no matter what could have happened inside it or what it has come to represent in art. The depicted house here is located in Ochre Pit Cove, a place I continue to return to as I ponder the significance of the house in my mind and art.

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS