Embodied Homelessness

Abstract

I locate my art and scholarship in the liminal spaces between the contrived socially and historically constructed metanarratives that explain poverty and the actual lived experiences of street youths, residents in tent communities, and sheltered and unsheltered children in America. Murals, poetry, re-purposed design and constructions, “found art,” and ecoaesthetics have been used for the telling of these personal experiences in an attempt to make meanings of the contradictions and unspoken assumptions of social metanarratives, unbalanced as they are with the fractured lives imposed by homeless-otherness. It is in this context of art-making and “in order to extend and expand their proposed functions prosthetically, linking the present with the past, the familiar with the strange, to see and understand the one from the other back and forth, and again” that I explore “the expansion, extension, and intersection of cultural spaces” that represent the premise of Charles Garoian’s book The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art.