My Bedroom is Not Your Bedroom
April 7 - May 21, 2023Salina Art Center
Salina, KS
My Bedroom is Not Your Bedroom is an immersive installation by Jared Packard comprising large-scale unstretched canvases suspended in a spiraling corridor that visitors are invited to move through and inhabit. Painted with oil, acrylic, and spray paint, then torn apart and stitched back together, the canvases form both the architecture and the subject of the work — enclosures that are simultaneously skin, shelter, and self-portrait. His material strategies — chemically incompatible paints that crack and blister, raw unprimed canvas that absorbs and degrades, seams that hold disparate pieces in fragile relation — enact identity as something accumulated, wounded, and repaired rather than fixed or declared.
This project departs from a tension familiar to queer experience: the pressure to locate and declare one's orientation. In response, Packard constructs a space designed not to resolve that pressure but to disorient productively — to ask what new forms of knowing and connection disorientation might make available. The corridor offers no clear entry or exit. Passage through it may mean an unavoidable, close encounter with a stranger. Rather than resolving that discomfort, the installation holds it open as a question worth sitting with.
A sound composition by collaborator Jared Brown accompanies the work, treating recordings of sexual encounters and studio process alike — abstracting them into layered textures that resist easy legibility while preserving their charge. Together, the visual and sonic elements ask visitors to reckon with the distance between public and private, and with what forms of intimacy become possible — or unavoidable — when that distance collapses.
Video Documentation
(Click on the images below to link to content)
(Click on the images below to link to content)
Intro
Making (painting)
Sound Collaboration
Making (sewing)